Nabokov's Dozen - Thirteen Stories by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov's Dozen: Thirteen Stories by Vladimir Nabokov / ISBN 9780241630884 / 240-page hardback from Penguin

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Introducing Little Clothbound Classics: irresistible, mini editions of short stories, novellas and essays from the world's greatest writers, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith...bound in colorful, tactile cloth and stamped with foil.

Thirteen ingeniously crafted stories make up Vladimir Nabokov's baker's dozen. In some of these stories shadowy people pass through, cooped up by life, with nowhere to escape. In others, elusive glimpses of fleeting happiness, which flutter away before they can be snatched, waylay their victims. Like the shimmer of the sea, the gleam of a glass caught by the sun, these stories sparkle brilliantly only to dissolve again. (First published in 1958.)

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland.