- 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.)
- 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.”