Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle

Description: A beautiful hardcover edition of one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the fantastical love story that was the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.

This story of a man's lifelong entanglement with his sister is not only a love story; it manages also to be a fairy tale, an epic, a philosophical treatise on the nature of time, a parody of the history of the novel, and an erotic catalogue. It concludes with an ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom. Ada, or Ardor, published just after Nabokov's seventieth birthday, is the supreme work of a virtuosic imagination at white heat.

Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.

Review Quotes: "Like Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights, Nabokov's Ada offers a vision of paradise, visions of lushly earthy couplings--naked, multi-partnered, and repeated--and a vision of hell. Like Bosch's masterpiece, Nabokov's literary magnum opus also offers inexhaustible surprise and amusement, beauty and disgust. . . . . Nabokov lets himself go in Ada in the sense of giving full scope to his imagination and his knowledge of the world, its geography and history, its nature and its arts, especially literature and visual art from drawing to architecture; to the senses, the emotions, the mind; to passion and pathos; and to his sense of time and life as a feast."

--from the Introduction by Brian Boyd