The Original Of Laura
by Vladmir Nabokov

When Vladimir Nabokov died in 1977, he left instructions for his heirs to burn the 138 handwritten index cards that made up the rough draft of his final and unfinished novel, The Original of Laura. But Nabokovs wife, Vera, could not bear to destroy her husbands last work, and when she died, the fate of the manuscript fell to her son. Dmitri Nabokov, now seventy-fivethe Russian novelists only surviving heir, and translator of many of his bookshas wrestled for three decades with the decision of whether to honor his fathers wish or preserve for posterity the last piece of writing of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His decision finally to allow publication of the fragmented narrativedark yet playful, preoccupied with mortalityaffords us one last experience of Nabokovs magnificent creativity, the quintessence of his unparalleled body of work. Photos of the handwritten index cards accompany the text. They are perforated and can be removed and rearranged, as the author likely did when he was writing the novel. ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Vladimir Nabokov was born in 1899, in St. Petersburg, Russia. His acclaimed works of fiction include Lolita, Pnin, and Pale Fire, among others. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

Chronic City
by Jonathan Lethem

“The Fortress of Solitude” was a great novel, but also a chaotic sprawl — it addressed gentrification and race relations and comic books and disco and the prison system and more, on and endlessly on. “Chronic City” is more contained, less greedy in its grasp, and it is even better. It limits itself to a single big theme — but then, it’s the biggest there is: the pursuit of truth. Lethem once wrote, in an essay about John Ford’s movie “The Searchers,” that an actor “can be placed under examination as icon of a set of neurotic symptoms . . . and yet still operate as a creature of free will and moral relevance, a character whose choices matter.” This is Perkus’s lesson for Chase. Even in an alternate reality — even in a fiction — passion and significance are everywhere if you know where to look. NYTimes

Blood's a Rover
by James Ellroy

James Ellroy's astonishing creation, the Underworld USA Trilogy, is complete. Its concluding volume, Blood's a Rover, has just been published. The three long thrillers that make up the trilogy (American Tabloid, 1995; The Cold Six Thousand, 2001; Blood's a Rover, 2009) present a brutal counterhistory of America in the 1960s and 1970s—the assassinations, the social convulsions, the power-elite plotting—through the lives of invented second- and third-echelon operatives in the great political crimes of the era. The trilogy is biblical in scale, catholic in its borrowing from conspiracy theories, absorbing to read, often awe-inspiring in the liberties taken with standard fictional presentation, and, in its imperfections and lapses, disconcerting.