Nabokov’s Last in Playboy

Playboy has bought the rights to serialise Vladimir Nabokov’s last, and hitherto unpublished, novel

The magazine about T&A and Q&A has bought the rights to serialise Vladimir Nabokov’s last, and hitherto unpublished, novel. It’s a good fit: Playboy and the author of Lolita. Though Nabokov had ordered that The Original of Laura be burnt, his estate decided to publish the book last year. So when the folks at Playboy heard, they wooed Nabokov’s literary agent Andrew Wylie relentlessly. “With orchids”, according to the magazine’s literary editor Amy Grace Loyd. The plot: a man, who had in his younger days been obsessively in love with a young woman, is now infatuated with his promiscuous wife. Heavy-duty stuff, even by Playboy’s high standards.

This is not the first Nabokov-Playboy collaboration. In 1964, in an in-depth interview with the magazine, he famously said he’d “never regret Lolita … there is a queer, tender charm about that mythical nymphet”.

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