Nabokov Officially a Playboy

GalleyCat reports that Playboy will publish 5,000 words of Vladmir Nobokov’s final unfinished novella The Original of Laura in December, one week before the work hits bookstores.

Playboy won the bid after Nabokov’s agent Andrew Wylie’s original requested to The New Yorker was turned down. According to the New York Observer, “the fiction department was not interested.”

Playboy‘s literary editor Amy Grace Loyd remarked, “I’m happy to tell you we’ve never paid this much for a book excerpt before, ever.”

Interesting, considering Loyd had to make her offer to Wylie without being allowed to view a single page of the work. When she did read it, she said she found parts of the book “much more cohesive than others.” (The magazine has published Nabokov before, excerpting part of his Ada, or Ardor, in 1969.)

MobyLives tells us the published work consists of a series of 138 notecards (which Nabokov, on his deathbed, explicitly ordered his family to destroy upon his death). Against those wishes, the hardcover book will feature photos of each card, matched with transcripts of the notecard text on the facing page.

According to Bookseller, the book is expected to go for $35 per copy.

Read a detailed and captivating account of Nabokov’s son Dmitri’s decision and his conversations with Slate.com’s Ron Rosenbaum before his decision to sell the novella and afterward.

The controversy still swirls. ASF wonders simply if the note cards, and Nabokov’s ghost, wouldn’t rest more comfortably in a museum or collection rather than winding its way through the machinations of publishing’s digestive tract. Then again, perhaps nothing’s sacred–even Mother Teresa’s diary, including her crisis of faith, was published against her wishes.