Playboy supposedly paid the highest advance in its history for the right to serialize the work. The offer was made sight unseen. One would rather not imagine the long faces when Laura finally lays bare her scant charms.

For thirty years there were whispers about Laura. The manuscript that the dying author in 1977 told his family to destroy was not the Holy Grail, but the final king's chamber in the pyramid of an oeuvre that rises stunningly from the literature of the twentieth century. After decades of hesitation, Nabokov's son Dmitri is about to present the opus posthumum to the public: not a novel, but 138 hand-written, often fragmentary index cards, which form perhaps a third of what can be described at most as the adumbration of a novel. 

The son's hesitation was only too understandable: Nabokov's last will actually left no room for interpretation. The writer was prudish in matters of unfinished manuscripts and didn't want to give people a peek into his workshop. On the other hand: What about his famous predecessors from Virgil to Kafka, whose testamentary instructions were likewise disobeyed, to the benefit of posterity? And hadn't Nabokov once attempted to incinerate Lolita itself, only to be thwarted by his wife? Perhaps in the case of Laura, too, Nabokov would have reconsidered his decision, which might have been made in a similar moment of weakness? And yet: Could one disregard his express wish, in a sense wresting from his hands something unfinished to which he clung? Read More

THE CENTRE DAILY TIMES – State College, PA

I lied about my age to get my first job. I guess I figured 12 years old wasn't a strict cutoff for work as a paperboy, just an indicator, and other, stronger indicators told me I was ready. I doubt the delivery driver I met on a Sunday before dawn to show me the route cared much for such details either. I was committed, competent, lived nearby, hit puberty early, and had a father who would do my route when I was sick—what more could he ask for from an 11-year-old paperboy?

The last dozen years or so have seen the emergence of a new strain within the Anglo-American novel. What has been variously referred to as the novel of consciousness or the psychological or confessional novel—the novel, at any rate, about the workings of a mind—has transformed itself into the neurological novel, wherein the mind becomes the brain. Since 1997, readers have encountered, in rough chronological order, Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love (de Clérambault’s syndrome, complete with an appended case history by a fictional “presiding psychiatrist” and a useful bibliography), Jonathan Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn (Tourette’s syndrome), Mark Haddon’s Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (autism), Richard Powers’s The Echomaker (facial agnosia, Capgras syndrome), McEwan again with Saturday (Huntington’s disease, as diagnosed by the neurosurgeon protagonist), Atmospheric Disturbances (Capgras syndrome again) by a medical school graduate, Rivka Galchen, and John Wray’s Lowboy (paranoid schizophrenia). And these are just a selection of recently published titles in “literary fiction.” There are also many recent genre novels, mostly thrillers, of amnesia, bipolar disorder, and multiple personality disorder. As young writers in Balzac walk around Paris pitching historical novels with titles like The Archer of Charles IX, in imitation of Walter Scott, today an aspiring novelist might seek his subject matter in a neglected corner or along some new frontier of neurology.

After David Foster Wallace's tragic death last September 12, while unburdening my shelf of his works to give them a good nostalgic thumbing-through, I remembered an LP in my collection—plucked several summers ago from the dollar bin of a liquidating Cambridge record store—by an artist with the same name as one of Wallace's most memorable characters. The album, called Priorities, was by Michael Pemulis, whose literary namesake is the twitchy Allstonian best friend cum drug dealer of Hal Incandenza, protagonist of Infinite Jest. Despite the coincidence of names and appealing cover art, the uninspiring bar-band-trapped-in-a-studio sound had caused me to quickly banish Michael Pemulis to the bottom of a milk crate.

When I pulled the album out last September, though, I noticed it had been recorded in Phoenix, where some of Infinite Jest takes place, and released in 1987, the year that Wallace graduated with an MFA from the University of Arizona.

"I've never heard of the author or the book," said Tony Victor, the founder of the label that put out the Pemulis record, via phone from Phoenix. He explained that Pemulis (pronounced ‘PEEM-yoo-lis') was his own brother's stage name and that compared to other Placebo Records artists—among them the influential experimental rock band, Sun City Girls—Pemulis was "very, very not popular." The author, Victor guessed, got the name from a playbill. Read More

More than half a century ago, Randall Jarrell was invited to speak at an academic panel on "The Obscurity of The Modern Poet." The problem the panel's title obviously implied was that "the Modern Poet" had adopted a strategy of willful difficulty, shunning the common reader. Jarrell began his talk with a cheeky misreading, saying that after hearing of the panel's subject,

I was delighted, for I have suffered from this obscurity all my life. But then I realized that I was being asked to talk not about the fact that people don't read poetry, but about the fact that most of them wouldn't understand it if they did: about the difficulty, not the neglect, of contemporary poetry. … Since most people know about the modern poet only that he is obscure—i.e., that he is difficult, i.e., that he is neglected—they naturally make a causal connection between the two meanings of the word, and decide that he is unread because he is difficult. Some of the time this is true; some of the time the reverse is true: the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry.

I thought of Jarrell and the conflation of difficulty with neglect after reading Time book critic Lev Grossman's rather unfortunate consideration, in last weekend's Wall Street Journal, of the Obscurity of the Modern Novelist. "Good Books Don't Have to Be Hard," would make a fine, snarky dismissal of Grossman's argument, were it not the actual title the Journal had given to the piece. Read More

I've been to a lot of panel discussions. I know what they're like. When one hears the phrase panel discussion, one likes to think it's a discussion that goes somewhere—like Plato's Symposium. This is not always the case. Panels frequently fail to adhere to the template of dialectical inquiry. Attending a panel discussion is often about schmoozing, bringing your business card, double-dipping cauliflower, drinking as much beer as possible, and recognizing at least a few people in the crowd. I have no problem with that part.

When Mario Jursich and Andres Hoyos founded the literary-cultural magazine El Malpensante in 1996, Colombia's president, Ernesto Samper, had recently emerged unscathed from a series of trials revealing financial ties between his campaign and one of Colombia's most infamous and powerful drug cartels, the Cartel de Cali. The armed conflict between military, guerrilla, and paramilitary groups was reaching new violent heights and infiltrating nearly every level of urban and rural life. The country was enshrouded in an atmosphere of chaos and fear, so thorough and penetrating that a sinister new mantra soon emerged: todos los colombianos somos secuestrables—all Colombians are kidnappable. All of us: not just the wealthy and the powerful. (The world secuestrable, cumbersome in English, is succinct and correct in Spanish, and was ubiquitous at the time). This national state of fear left little space for intellectual pursuits. El Espectador, the country's oldest newspaper, had recently cancelled its Sunday magazine, which until that point had served as a lonely bastion for Colombian literary writing. Print media, television, and radio, when they weren't dedicated to covering massacres and unpunished political corruption, provided solace in distraction—beauty queens, telenovelas, soccer. Read More

How much money does a writer need? In New York, a young writer can get by on $25,000, give or take $5,000, depending on thriftiness. A slightly older younger writer—a 30-year-old—will need another $10,000 to keep up appearances. But that's New York. There are parts of this country where a person can live on twelve or thirteen thousand a year—figures so small they can be written out. Of course it depends. Read More

By now everyone is familiar with the hype cycle. You know the drill: the ginned- up enthusiasm of publicists combines with word of mouth (and blog) to create so-called buzz. Articles appear, posing one of three questions. For the new artist: is this the next big thing? For the established artist (or restaurateur): will stratospheric expectations be met? For the figure whose stock is down: can a comeback be staged? Then the release date arrives, or the premiere, or opening; at last the thing itself can contend with its reception. But, wait, now backlash surges alongside the ongoing hype. And understandably, too: it's not nice being force-fed even the tastiest food. But hold on a second, here comes the backlash-to-the-backlash ... Read More

Sadness is general, as is solipsism. Kevin Brockmeier's second collection of stories, The View from the Seventh Layer, comprises four "Fables" and nine other morose and mystical fictions. The book confirms that Brockmeier, who moonlights as a writer of children's books, is as prolific as he is sensitive and sorrowful. Now thirty-five, he has published one previous collection and two novels. His first novel, The Truth about Celia, like many popular national news stories of the past decade, concerned a missing little girl. The Brief History of the Dead, a portion of which appeared in The New Yorker, proceeded from the premise that there is a city where the souls of the deceased dwell for as long as someone alive on earth remembers them; in the course of the novel, the city's population bulges, then dwindles as the planet is ravaged by a world war and then a plague that threatens to wipe out humanity. Read More