Nabokov fans, brace yourselves! Nabokov scholar Michael Maar accuses the author of stealing the premise of Lolita from another writer. Pair with this Millions essay about designing the cover of the book.
Who Wrote It First
Short Story Shop Talk
Robert Birnbaum and Tobias Wolff talk short stories and other topics at The Morning News. Wolff: “Somebody once described the novel as a prose narrative of a certain length that has something wrong with it. I can think of a few novels that seem to have nothing wrong with them at all, but I can think of a lot more short stories that seem to me to be perfect.”
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“Years passed.”
Recommended Reading: “So I Went Away” by Crapalachia author Scott McClanahan.
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As I Sit Writing
“I had invented a writing table out of a wheelbarrow in the coal bunker, just beyond a wall from where a dynamo ran. It made a deep, constant humming noise. There was no more work to do until about 4 a.m., when we would have to clean the fires and get up steam again.” The University of Mississippi power plant where William Faulkner wrote his self-styled “tour-de-force” As I Lay Dying is slated to be demolished. Here’s a nice, complementary piece on slowing down to read Faulkner.
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Abandon All Carts
If you’ve read the Inferno, you’ve journeyed with Dante and Virgil to the ninth circle of Hell. At McSweeney’s, you can go grocery shopping with them. “Abandon all carts, ye who enter here.”
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J.M. Coetzee on Philip Roth
Introducing Our New Interns!
We’re pleased as punch to introduce Millions readers to our new interns, Carolyn Quimby and Ariana Valderrama. Arianna is originally from Chicago but is currently based in Washington, D.C. where she works in communications. In high school she started a book blog, Reading in Color, where she reviewed over 200 middle grade and young adult books about people of color. On her nightstand right now: Locking Up Our Own: Crime and Punishment in Black America by James Forman Jr. and White Teeth by Zadie Smith. Carolyn works in academic publishing by day and is a freelance writer and book reviewer by night. Sometimes she dreams about going on a road trip solely dedicated to visiting bookstores, but mostly she tweets at @CarolynQuimby. Currently on her nightstand: Goodbye Vitamin by Rachel Khong and Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng. We couldn’t be happier to have Carolyn and Ariana on board!
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I had the impression from the exchange that Maar thought of Nabokov’s Lolita as more influenced by or derived from Lichberg’s than a plagiarism of it.
Unless someone can show us the sentences, in VN’s Lolita, that are (or nearly) word-for-word copies of sentences to be found in a text known to have preceded VN’s book, using the word “plagiarism”, here, is libellous and… idiotic. Anyway, Maar makes it clear that his interest in all this centers on the distinct (but literarily inconsequential) possibility of a secret connection between VN’s Lolita and a German writer’s book…. he’s trying to hunt down another one of VN’s pranks. Did whoever linked this actually read the article…?
From the article:
Question: “So let’s get this out of the way first—is this about plagiarism?”
Answer: “Of course not. The word came up in the press when I published my first article about the discovery, but that’s not what this is about at all.”
And so it persists in the press. Maybe I should just be skipping straight to the Parid Review?
The stealth edit from “plagiarism” to “stealing the premise” is hilarious. This slender distinction, adopted presumably out of self-delusion, is also incorrect.