"Deeply moving."- The Seattle Times Stacy Schiff brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time: Vladimir Nabokov, émigré author of Lolita Pale Fire and Speak, Memory, and his beloved wife, Véra. She was also the woman who kept her 14-year-old son away from “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.About the Book "Vera" is the "utterly romantic" ("New York" magazine) story of the 52-year marriage between Vladimir Nabokov, one the 20th century's most original writers, and a woman with an intellect and devotion to literature equal to her husband's.īook Synopsis WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY - NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - From the award-winning author of The Revolutionary and The Witches comes "an elegantly nuanced portrait of wife, showing us just how pivotal Nabokov's marriage was to his hermetic existence and how it indelibly shaped his work."-Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times ONE OF ESQUIRE'S 50 BEST BIOGRAPHIES OF ALL TIME "Monumental."- The Boston Globe When she met Edmund White, she recited a long section of his novel “Forgetting Elena’’ to him. Vera Nabokov read just as ferociously but also more critically. SCHIFF: Ben Franklin read with the hunger you would expect from someone who spent his lunch money on books. So it was possible for her to read all the major works in existence.īOOKS: Of the people you’ve written about, who were the biggest readers? The premier library of the day was in her backyard. SCHIFF: Cleopatra would have known her Homer, Aeschylus, Euripides, and surely had a good laugh over Herodotus’s outrageous description of Egypt. SCHIFF: For standouts among modern works on the classical world, first place goes to Peter Green’s magnificent biography of “Alexander of Macedon.’’ Anthony Everitt’s “Cicero’’ is also beautifully crafted. And Ron Chernow’s “Alexander Hamilton’’ is unputdownable.īOOKS: Any books you read for Cleopatra that you’d recommend? I go back to some less orthodox works regularly as well such as Richard Holmes’s “Footsteps’’ and Phyllis Rose’s “Parallel Lives,’’ which is about five Victorian marriages. Clemens and Mark Twain,’’ and James Mellow’s “Charmed Circle,’’ about Gertrude Stein’s salon, set the gold standard. SCHIFF: Early on Richard Ellman’s “Oscar Wilde,’’ Justin Kaplan’s “Mr.
When I see the little “Wi-Fi’’ sticker, I feel myself reel.īOOKS: Were there biographies that inspired you to become a biographer? Wireless Wi-Fi on airplanes may be the end of me. Another thing that distracts, increasingly and incessantly, is e-mail. SCHIFF: Writing nonfiction does distract me from my fiction habit. BOOKS: Can you keep up your reading when deep in writing a biography?
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