The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
Sixty-five stories, written from his Berlin exile in the twenties to the mid-fifties, when he gave the form up for Lolita and Pale Fire. His son Dmitri gathered them in 1995, eleven of them Englished for the first time. The famous ones live here: 'Spring in Fialta,' 'The Vane Sisters' with its haunted closing acrostic, and 'Signs and Symbols,' a few pages that may be the most argued-over short story of the century. Nabokov at short length is still Nabokov; every sentence is built like a pocket watch.
The book runs in rough chronology, and chronology is a cruel editor: it seats the Berlin apprentice work of a writer in his twenties at the front, while 'Spring in Fialta' and 'The Vane Sisters' wait deep in the stack. The Russian stories arrive through translation, and even with the author and his son doing the carrying, wordplay pays a toll at that border. His coldness is real too: he pins his characters like specimens, and sixty-five in a row can feel like touring a butterfly case. Dip; don't march.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
