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
Near to the wild heart
A charming doodle of the beautiful connecting covers for mid Clarice Lispector’s four soon-to-be-released novels. You can also buy a poster of the original from New Directions. And given how much Carolyn Kellogg enjoyed them, mentally shelving the Brazilian author beside Kafka and Joyce, and of course based on the near infinite readability of The Hour of the Star, I’m wondering if this will be the year of Lispector.
Six Plots
We are all by now familiar with J.K. Rowling‘s elaborate, hand-drawn outlines for the Harry Potter series, but what if all plots could be simplified further? Down to, let’s say, graphs? And not even an infinite number of graphs, but just six? The Paris Review considers the work of Matthew Jockers, a literature professor who studies “the relationship between sentiment and plot shape in fiction.”
Why Criticism Matters
“We live in the age of opinion — offered instantly, effusively and in increasingly strident tones. Much of it goes by the name of criticism, and in the most superficial sense this is accurate.” The New York Times approached six accomplished critics, Stephen Burns, Katie Roiphe, Pankaj Mishra, Adam Kirsch, Sam Anderson, and Elif Batuman to explain, in the spirit of Alfred Kazin, “what it is they do, why they do it and why it matters.”
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Trigger warning: Breakups ahead
Kim Addonizio‘s latest collection of short stories, The Palace of Illusions, is due out this month. Here is a sneak peek, the story, “Another Breakup Song,” featuring a distinctly Raymond Carver-esque vibe.
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#Read4Refugees
Go Jane Give organized the “#Read4Refugees” social media campaign, encouraging users to raise awareness and funds for refugee issues. Over the past month, numerous well-known authors have joined in, including Junot Díaz, Jodi Picoult, Sue Monk Kidd, and Sherman Alexie, among others.
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Arthur Phillips, Still Writing
This thoroughly entertaining conversation between Robert Birnbaum and Arthur Phillips is not to be missed. Topics include faking Shakespeare, beagles, being anti-social in Brooklyn, pilates, and writing for a living.
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The Best of Last (Crusade)
I’m shocked that this is even open to debate. Emily Asher-Perrin on why Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is the best of all Indy films.
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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.