From the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita Pale Fire and Ada or Ardor and so many others comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and 1950s these sixty-five tales--eleven of which have been translated into English for the first time--display all the shades of Nabokov s imagination. They range from sprightly fables to bittersweet tales of loss from claustrophobic exercises in horror to a connoisseur s samplings of the table of human folly. Read as a whole The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov offers and intoxicating draft of the master s genius his devious wit and his ability to turn language into an instrument of ecstasy.