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Anatomy of a Short Story: Nabokov's Puzzles, Codes, Signs and Symbols
Author(s): John Banville (Author), Yuri Leving (Author)
- Publisher: Continuum
- Publication Date: 9 Aug. 2012
- Edition: Illustrated
- Language: English
- Print length: 432 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441196064
- ISBN-13: 9781441196064
Book Description
Anatomy of a Short Story contains:
– the full text of “Signs and Symbols,” line numbered and referenced throughout the book
– correspondence about the story, most of it never before published, between Nabokov and the editor of The New Yorker, where the story was first published
– 33 essays of literary criticism on the story, bringing together classic essays and new interpretations
– a round-table discussion in which a screenwriter, a theater scholar, a mathematician, a psychiatrist, and a literary scholar bring their perspectives to bear on ‘Signs and Symbols’
Anatomy of a Short Story illuminates the ways in which we interpret fiction, and the short story in particular.
Editorial Reviews
Review
Leving’s collection is a huge achievement, and its scope is impressive, with thirty articles in total, mostly previously published, spanning over thirty years of scholarship. This is the book’s foremost triumph and as such positions itself alongside the
Garland Companion to Vladimir Nabokov, is a must for anyone interested in Nabokov’s story and, more generally, the historical progression of Nabokov studies.Matthew Apperley, UCL SSEES, The Slavonic and East European Review (Vol. 92, No. 2, April 2014)
The critical anthology is called “Anatomy of a Short Story” not accidentally. What we have here is not a marauding or exhuming of a senseless body, but a study of a living artistic organism. Collective dissection presupposes using various methods, diversified optics and descriptive procedures… Yuri Leving’s own array of scholarly interests turns “Anatomy” from a potentially dull registrar’s compendium into a collection of peculiar and often unexpected utterances about Nabokov’s text… This book will prove handy to anyone interested both in Nabokov as well as in studying literary texts in general.
LiteraruS – Literaturnoe Slovo
About the Author
Yuri Leving is Associate Professor and Chair in the Department of Russian Studies, Dalhousie University, Canada. He is the author of three books, including
Train Station — Garage — Hangar: Vladimir Nabokov and the Poetics of Russian Urbanism (2004) and Keys to The Gift: A Guide to V. Nabokov’s Novel (2011), and has also co-edited three volumes, including Empire N: Nabokov and His Heirs (2006) and Goalkeeper: The Nabokov Almanac (2010). Leving has published over seventy scholarly articles on various aspects of Russian and comparative literature. He served as a commentator on the first authorized Russian edition of The Collected Works of Vladimir Nabokov in five volumes (1999-2001), and was the curator for the exhibition ‘Nabokov’s Lolita: 1955-2005’ in Washington, D.C., which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the publication of Lolita.
