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
To Save a Draft
“Save everything, she said. Everything. When your archive gets bought, they pay by the cubic foot.” Sarah Manguso in The New York Times about drafts in an era of digital writing. And while we’re on the subject , here’s what Ben Fountain, Emily St. John Mandel, Emma Straub and a passel of other writers have to say about writing that elusive first draft.
Tuesday New Release Day: Wolfe, Attenberg, Snicket, Onion
Tom Wolfe is back with his new novel Back to Blood (our review) and Jami Attenberg’s The Middlesteins is out. Lemony Snicket is kicking off a new series for kids, illustrated by artist Seth. Finally, do you want to know everything about everything? The Onion is looking out for you with its new Onion Book of Known Knowledge: A Definitive Encyclopaedia Of Existing Information.
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Tuesday New Release Day: Ferris; Khakpour; Fierro; Hemmings; Mosley; Boyden; Melnik; Ma; Johnston
Year in Reading alum Joshua Ferris has a new book on shelves this week, as does Millions contributor Porochista Khakpour. Also out: Cutting Teeth by Julia Fierro; The Possibilities by Kaui Hart Hemmings; Debbie Doesn’t Do It Anymore by Walter Mosley; The Orenda by Joseph Boyden; Snow in May by Kseniya Melnik; The Year She Left Us by Kathryn Ma; and Remember Me Like This by Bret Anthony Johnston. For more on these and other new titles, go read our Great 2014 Book Preview.
Stories Upon Stories
A D Jameson asked HTMLGIANT readers to name “the best story that [they’d] read in the past few years,” and then he handily rounded up all of the answers and arranged them chronologically. He even provided links when he could. I guess we’ll see you guys next month!
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The Teenage Years are More Dystopian Than Ever
Led by Millions Top Tenner The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, dystopia is unseating vampires as the dominant theme in teen fiction, according to The Independent. The paper lists several other examples of the hot new trend, including Plague by Michael Grant and Matched by Ally Condie. (We’d argue that with dystopian classics like 1984 and Lord of the Flies on teen reading lists for decades, this is an old trend that’s new again.)
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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.