In honor of April Fools’ Day, I was going to write about (in)famous literary hoaxes: historic incidents of made-up memoirs when an author manages to trick the entire reading public.

There are already a number of Top Ten Lists of these kinds of hoaxes, including one from the Guardian and another from ABC News. They include a handful of Holocaust memoirs and James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces.”

But then I started to think more about it.  What is a hoax, anyways, when dealing with literature?  Why do people allow themselves to feel betrayed by an author?  I’m going to hesitantly posit an idea:  The whole concept of a literary hoax is a dying one because of the advent of postmodern literature.

Okay, bear with me here. Read more »

Artists create 164 unique speculative designs for Nabokov’s Lolita:

As does artist Jim Tierney for Jules Verne’s classics:

Does book design matter to you? If you weren’t interested in reading these books before, do the spiffy new covers convince you to give the book a shot? I’m curious.

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[Via The Rumpus and The Millions.]

The ghost of Vladimir Nabokov: "I told you to burn that damn book!"

I was troubled when I first read in the New York Times that Vladimir Nabokov’s final, unfinished novel (The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun)) was published against his explicit instructions. At the end of his life, Nabokov told his wife, Vera, to destroy Laura if he had not finished it before he died.  Because she failed to carry out this task, Laura fell into the hands of Nabokov’s son, Dmitri. Dmitri, now in his mid-70s, decided to hand over the notes containing his father’s final creative efforts to a publisher (Knopf) because he felt his father would not “have opposed the release of Laura once Laura had survived the hum of time this long.” Representing what Dmitri claims is “the most concentrated distillation” of his father’s creativity, Laura consists of a series of index cards and notes packaged in a fancy, expensive book. It’s not really a novel but more of a peek into a writer’s creative process.

But should it have been published?

At first I thought “oh hell no” and was very angered by what I interpreted as Dmitri’s callous disregard for his father’s final wishes. But then I read Nathaniel Rich’s article on The Daily Beast. Rich, who has actually read the book (unlike me), says that “to describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral” and calls the three year public debate over its publication “silly, meretricious” and “waged on false grounds.”

Here’s what I think: Read more »

Is November also National Book Cover Redesign Month? NaBoCoReMo? Did nobody tell me?

Carin Goldberg’s iconic series design from the late 1980s has been replaced with an ostensibly hipper-looking one:

Art director John Gall has also undertaken a book cover redesign project. The assignment: redesign Vladimir Nabokov’s entire book covers, all 21 of them. The result: 21 beautiful specimen boxes (a lovely homage to Nabokov’s passion for butterfly collecting), each created by a different designer: Read more »