They Began a New Era

The late James Salter’s last piece for the New York Review of Books, on David McCullough’s Wright brothers biography.

Published: Aug 6, 2015
Length: 15 minutes (3,753 words)

An Old Magician Named Nabokov Writes and Lives in Splendid Exile

From the author of the new novel All That Is, a 1975 profile of Vladimir Nabokov that he wrote for People Magazine:

“The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland’s Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, VĂ©ra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta.”

Source: People Magazine
Published: Mar 17, 1975
Length: 7 minutes (1,999 words)

Via Negativa

(Fiction) There is a kind of minor writer who is found in a room of the library signing his novel. His index finger is the color of tea, his smile filled with bad teeth. He knows literature, however. His sad bones are made of it. He knows what was written and where writers died. His opinions are cold but accurate. They are pure, at least there is that.

Published: Sep 1, 1972
Length: 12 minutes (3,246 words)