Simon Karlinsky has substantially expanded and revised the first edition of Vladimir Nabokov and Edmund Wilson's correspondence to include fifty-nine letters discovered subsequent to the book's original publication in 1979. Since then, five volumes of Edmund Wilson's diaries have been published, as well as a volume of Nabokov's correspondence with other people and Brian Boyd's definitive two-volume biography of Nabokov. The additional letters and a considerable body of new annotations clarify the correspondence, tracing in greater detail the two decades of close friendship between the writers.

Simon Karlinsky is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the editor of The Sexual Labyrinth of Nicolai Gogol (1992) and Anton Chekhov's Life and Thought (1997).

"[The letters] have been edited by Simon Karlinsky with useful annotation throughout and a superb introductory essay in which Karlinsky reviews disagreements that flicker and blaze through the letters, anticipating the famous public battle upon the occasion of Vladimir Nabokov's edition of Eugene Onegin. . . . There is a lot of interesting talk about money, illness, jobs, writing projects, editorial policy at The New Yorker, books, persons and butterflies. But the disagreements will attract the most attention not only because they make the best literary gossip but also because they give fascinating complexity to the drama of the Nabokov-Wilson letters and the disastrous friendship."—Leonard Michaels, The Nation

"It is good to have. . . [Karlinsky's] ample record of a former friendship between two polymathic, intensely committed minds and drolly stubborn, cagey personalities This package is blessed in its editor . . . [who is] able to footnote with authority and a fine thoroughness the copious quibbling between the two men. . . . Both the correspondents, tireless devotees of linguistic fine points, would have relished their editor's scrupulous rigor."—John Updike, The New Yorker

“Two strong-willed literati arguing about books, translation, the scansion of verse, pornography and more.”—Washington Post Book World

“The correspondence ends abruptly in 1965, when Wilson's harsh review of Nabokov's translations of Pushkin led to a prolonged public feud. But in 1971, Nabokov has been rereading the correspondence and sends a melancholy note-'It was such a pleasure to feel again; that constant excitement of art and intellectual discovery.' In this new, expanded paperback edition of the letters, it is an excitement every reader can share.”—Newsday

praise for the first edition:

"When two such brilliantly ebullient intellectuals get together by mail, they charge the air with all sorts of pyrotechnics."—Carlos Baker, author of Hemingway