POIDS LOURDS 2009 (PART 2)

The Original of Laura is a novel that Vladimir Nabokov was writing at the time of his death in 1977. It has never been published and its contents have been viewed only by Nabokov's son, wife, and a few scholars. Nabokov had requested that upon his death the work be destroyed. His family debated for over 30 years whether to carry out this wish to destroy an incomplete but perhaps important literary work. In April 2008, Nabokov's son Dmitri Nabokov announced plans to publish the work, in what Newsnight later said was "likely to be the literary event of 2009."
Based on discussions with unidentified scholars, The Times summarizes the plot as follows:
Philip Wild, an enormously corpulent scholar, is married to a slender, flighty and wildly promiscuous woman called Flora. Flora initially appealed to Wild because of another woman that he’d been in love with, Aurora Lee. Death and what lies beyond it, a theme which fascinated Nabokov from a very young age, are central. The book opens at a party and there follow four continuous scenes, after which the novel becomes more fragmented. It is not clear how old Wild is, but he is preoccupied with his own death and sets about obliterating himself from the toes upwards through meditation. A sort of deliberate self-inflicted self-erasure.
According to Newsnight, The Original of Laura "apparently concerns a portly academic called Philip Wild, and Flora, his much slimmer, 'wildly promiscuous' wife. Flora catches Wild's eye because of her resemblance to a young woman he had once been in love with. Wild is preoccupied by his own mortality, and resolves to obliterate himself from the toes upward, through the power of meditation."
According to his diaries, Nabokov first noted his work on the project on December 1, 1974 under the title Dying Is Fun. By the summer of 1976, he noted that the story was completed in his mind, but by then his health was failing rapidly.
When Nabokov died on July 2, 1977, he was still working on the novel, since retitled The Opposite of Laura and finally The Original of Laura. The incomplete manuscript consists of Nabokov's own handwriting across about 125 index cards, the equivalent of about 30 manuscript pages. The use of index cards was normal for Nabokov, also used for many of his works, such as Lolita and Pale Fire.



From the National Book Award winning author of The Echo Maker, Generosity (october 2009) a playful and provocative novel about the discovery of the happiness gene.
Thassa Amzwar, a 23-year-old survivor of the endless Algerian civil war, arrives in Chicago, taking night classes at an arts college in the South Loop. Her instructor, Russell Stone, expecting a damaged refugee, is astonished to find her an extremely solid and buoyant young woman, contagiously, relentlessly happy. Psychological examinations reveal her to be hyperthymic— blessed with a productive, continuous mania without the depression, hardwired for happiness. She comes to the attention of Thomas Kurton, a genomic researcher committed to the prospect of genetic understanding and control. Kurton and his fellow researchers declare Thassa’s happiness to be the product of a suite of genes that produce elevated well-being, an association that they promptly move to patent. When media, the infotainment industry, bloggers, politicians, religious leaders, Big Pharmacology, and other national interests get wind of the story, the future of the race’s well-being goes up for grabs and Thassa Amzwar and Russell Stone go on the run.
Sur un thème assez proche, donc, du superbe essai qu'il a publié il y a quelques semaines dans le Guardian et qu'on trouvera ici : http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?id=content_7481



Under the Dome is a novel currently being written by Stephen King. It is a rewrite of a novel King attempted writing twice in the 1980s, under the titles The Cannibals and Under the Dome. As King stated on his official site, these two unfinished works "were two very different attempts to utilize the same idea, which concerns itself with how people behave when they are cut off from the society they've always belonged to. Also, my memory of The Cannibals is that it, like Needful Things, was a kind of social comedy. The new Under the Dome is played dead straight."
King described the novel as "very, very long," saying "I tried [writing] this once before when I was a lot younger, and the project was just too big for me."] King has stated the novel is twice as long as his most recent, Duma Key, at "over 1,500 pages in manuscript",and "deals with some of the same issues that The Stand does, but in a more allegorical way."The first draft was completed in late August 2008, with the manuscript weighing 19 lbs (8.6kg). According to the publisher, the book is due to be released in the fall of 2009.