Brian Boyd

Brian Boyd explains why we tell stories and how our minds are shaped to understand them. After considering art as adaptation, Boyd examines Homer's Odyssey and Dr. Seuss's Horton Hears a Who! demonstrating how an evolutionary lens can offer new understanding and appreciation of specific works. Published for the bicentenary of Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of Origin of Species, Boyd's study embraces a Darwinian view of human nature and art, and offers a credo for a new humanism.

On the Origin of Stories

Cited as one of the best books of 1990 by The New York Times and Time magazine, this major biography describes Nabokov's escape from Russia, his education at Cambridge, and his impoverished years in Germany and France, until the coming of Hitler forced him to flee to the United States with his wife and son. 56 halftones.

The Russian Years

Vladimir Nabokov

Leads the reader step-by-step through Nabokov's Pale fire, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics.

The Magic of Artistic Discovery

Nabokov's Pale Fire

Anastasia Tolstoy

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews and Letters to the Editor

Think, Write, Speak

Stanislav Shvabrin

Collected into a single volume, a bilingual collection of Russian poetry, translated by the late author of Lolita, includes both the English translations and the Russian originals, along with three never-before-published poems written by Nabokov himself and the author's notes on the joys and dangers of translation.

Three Centuries of Russian Poetry

Verses and Versions

Interesting Times

Primary/Secondary Transition (Continuing Professional Devel)

Regarded by many as Nabokov's masterpiece, "Pale Fire" has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics.

Niall Stokes

Cowritten by journalist Brian Boyd, a close associate of U2, and Niall Stokes, editor of Ireland's legendary Hot Press magazine, U2 Songs + Experience recounts the band's incredible career and analyzes the songs from all their studio albums. Along with a discussion of the influences, inspiration, and origins of U2's immensely popular music, iconic and rare photographs showcase posters, backstage passes, classic flyers, and other rock memorabilia.

Songs + Experience

A rich compilation of the previously uncollected Russian and English prose and interviews of one of the twentieth century's greatest writers, edited by Nabokov experts Brian Boyd and Anastasia Tolstoy. "I think like a genius, I write like a distinguished author, and I speak like a child": so Vladimir Nabokov famously wrote in the introduction to his volume of selected prose, Strong Opinions. Think, Write, Speak follows up where that volume left off, with a rich compilation of his uncollected prose and interviews, from a 1921 essay about Cambridge to two final interviews in 1977. The chronological order allows us to watch the Cambridge student and the fledgling Berlin reviewer and poet turn into the acclaimed Paris émigré novelist whose stature brought him to teach in America, where his international success exploded with Lolita and propelled him back to Europe. Whether his subject is Proust or Pushkin, the sport of boxing or the privileges of democracy, Nabokov's supreme individuality, his keen wit, and his alertness to the details of life illuminate the page.

Uncollected Essays, Reviews, Interviews, and Letters to the Editor

Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

Jean Holabird

Jean Holabird's unique interpretation of the alphabets of literary great, Vladimir Nabokov, is a visual masterpiece. Nabokov had synesthesia, a condition that causes the neurological mixing of the senses so that people who have this condition may hear colors, see sounds, and taste sensations, responses common but not exclusive to autism and the effects of hallucinogenic drugs. Nabokov, in a delightful passage in his autobiographical tour de force, "Speak Memory", claims that he himself "presented a fine case of colored hearing". While playing with alphabet blocks as a child he discovered that the colors were all 'wrong' and later described the phenomenon as follows: "the color sensation seems to be produced by the very act of my orally forming a given letter while I imagine its outline." Of all the blocks he had played with none matched the color of his expectations. In this superb new book, artist Jean Holabird masterfully brings to life the charming and vibrant synesthetic colored letters, that up until now, only existed in Nabokov's great mind.

Alphabet in Color

In this book, Brian Boyd surveys Vladimir Nabokov's life, career, and legacy; his art, science, and thought; his subtle humor and puzzle-like storytelling; his complex psychological portraits; and his inheritance from, reworking of, and affinities with Shakespeare, Pushkin, Tolstoy, and Machado de Assis. Boyd also offers new ways of reading Lolita, Pale Fire, Ada or Ardor, and the unparalleled autobiography, Speak, Memory, disclosing otherwise unknown information about the author's world. Sharing his personal reflections as he recounts the adventures, hardships, and revelations of researching Nabokov's life? oeuvre?, he cautions against using Nabokov's metaphysics as the key to unlocking all of the enigmatic author's secrets. Assessing and appreciating Nabokov as novelist, memoirist, poet, translator, scientist, and individual, Boyd helps us understand more than ever Nabokov's multifaceted genius.

Stalking Nabokov

In Why Lyrics Last, the internationally acclaimed critic Brian Boyd turns an evolutionary lens on the subject of lyric verse. He finds that lyric making, though it presents no advantages for the species in terms of survival and reproduction, is “universal across cultures because it fits constraints of the human mind.” An evolutionary perspective— especially when coupled with insights from aesthetics and literary history—has much to tell us about both verse and the lyrical impulse. Boyd places the writing of lyrical verse within the human disposition “to play with pattern,” and in an extended example he uncovers the many patterns to be found within Shakespeare’s Sonnets. Shakespeare’s bid for readership is unlike that of any sonneteer before him: he deliberately avoids all narrative, choosing to maximize the openness of the lyric and demonstrating the power that verse can have when liberated of story. In eschewing narrative, Shakespeare plays freely with patterns of other kinds: words, images, sounds, structures; emotions and moods; argument and analogy; and natural rhythms, in daily, seasonal, and life cycles. In the originality of his stratagems, and in their sheer number and variety, both within and between sonnets, Shakespeare outdoes all competitors. A reading of the Sonnets informed by evolution is primed to attend to these complexities and better able to appreciate Shakespeare’s remarkable gambit for immortal fame.

Evolution, Cognition, and Shakespeare’s Sonnets

Why Lyrics Last

David Rothenberg

Julia Hyland Bruno

Songs and Signs: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Cultural Transmission and Inheritance in Human and Nonhuman Animals

The Place of Consciousness

Nabokov's Ada

русские годы : биография

Владимир Набоков

Русские годы : Биография

Argues that lyric making is universal across cultures, and uses the example of Shakespeare's "Sonnets" to showcase the human disposition to play with lyrical patterns.

Brian Boyd

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