• A brief, engaging history of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita at fifty includes the tale of Vera Nabokov preventing her husband from tossing the unfinished manuscript into the incinerator.

• Zadie Smith shrinks from readers’ questions at the Edinburgh Book Fest. (A link to an excerpt from the new novel is available here. Or just scroll down.)

• The first translation of War and Peace in fifty years “reaffirms its greatness.”

• It only takes “three pages and about 50 lines for the vagina to make its first appearance” in Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel

• In These Times considers the two comings-out of Oscar Wilde.

• Robert MacFarlane says J.M. Coetzee’s latest book, Slow Man, is “not only unmistakably Coetzee’s least accomplished work, it is also, by more general standards, a mediocre novel.”