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  Jay Parini Tender Is the Writer Paradise Lost: A Life of F Scott Fitzgerald By David S Brown Harvard University Press 413pp £23.95 I’d Die for You and Other Lost Stories By F Scott Fitzgerald (Edited by Anne Margaret Daniel) Scribner 358pp £16.99   F Scott Fitzgerald is the most irresistible of modern American writers, and readers return to his pages time and again. When Paradise Lost landed on my desk for review, I had just, over the past year, read through Fitzgerald’s major novels and stories, work I’ve known and admired for half a century. But classic literature is, in Pound’s great phrase, ‘news that stays news’, and I continue to read Fitzgerald as compulsively as I read the daily headlines. The problem with Fitzgerald has never been the work; it’s been the writing about him. The standard biography for some time has been Some Sort of Epic Grandeur , a 1981 study by Matthew J Bruccoli. It’s a reliable and boring compilation of facts, not as well written as the first ma...

  The Paris Review Subscribe Vladimir Nabokov , The Art of Fiction No. 40 Interviewed by Herbert Gold Issue 41, Summer-Fall 1967 Vladimir Nabokov lives with his wife Véra in the Montreux Palace Hotel in Montreux, Switzerland, a resort city on Lake Geneva which was a favorite of Russian aristocrats of the last century. They dwell in a connected series of hotel rooms that, like their houses and apartments in the United States, seem impermanent, places of exile. Their rooms include one used for visits by their son Dmitri, and another, the chambre de debarras, where various items are deposited—Turkish and Japanese editions of Lolita , other books, sporting equipment, an American flag. Nabokov arises early in the morning and works. He does his writing on filing cards, which are gradually copied, expanded, and rearranged until they become his novels. During the warm season in Montreux he likes to take the sun and swim at a pool in a garden near the hotel. His appearance at sixty-eight i...