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Ada, or Ardor

A Family Chronicle

Part of Vintage International

Author Vladimir Nabokov
$11.99 US
Knopf | Vintage
On sale Feb 16, 2011 | 9780307788016
Sales rights: US, Canada, Open Mkt
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Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.  It tells a love story troubled by incest.  

It is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.  Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously  sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
“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

About

Published two weeks after his seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of Nabokov's greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist.  It tells a love story troubled by incest.  

It is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue.  Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat.

This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously  sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.

Praise

“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

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