The Latest Breaking News from Vladimir Nabokov

Losing yourself in a great novel is one of life’s joys. Here our critics Ceri Radford and Chris Harvey pick the books you need to read

In an occasional series, our authors make the case for or against controversial books.

Losing yourself in a great novel is one of life’s joys. Here our critics Ceri Radford and Chris Harvey pick the books you need to read

Never one to downplay the power of film, Stanley Kubrick once said that “almost every novel could be successfully adapted”. He carried this confidence into his own filmmaking, working not from original screenplays, but from adaptations of novels as different as William Makepeace Thackeray’s historical romp Barry Lyndon (1844) and…

Jason Epstein was the publisher and editor of authors such as Norman Mailer, Vladimir Nabokov, Philip Roth and Gore Vidal. In his 2001 book, Book Business, he described how the once-relaxed Random House – where authors frequented the publishing office (and sometimes slept there), and where editors had stronger relationships…

Why readers and writers will have to fight against a closing in of culture more than ever

The first, and greatest, adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s troubling 1955 novel still possesses a strange and unnerving power