La vie, les gens et autres effets sécondaires / Life, People and Other Side Effects / Nabokov

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Author:

Ivan Nabokov with Philippe Aronson

Date:

Les Escales
January 2021

Category:

6. Memoir/Biography , Les Escales

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Additional Info

LIFE, PEOPLE AND OTHER SIDE EFFECTS

Rights Holder: Les Escales
Original Language: French

The memoir of Ivan Nabokov, internationally acclaimed publisher and a man with a thousand lives whose career ran parallel with the cultural and political spectrum of the 20th century.

Ivan Nabokov is a man who was born without a country in France in 1932. His parents, both 29 at the time, came from Russian nobility but lost everything during the Revolution, including their nationality. It wasn’t until age 7 when Ivan became a U.S. citizen, a year after his family settled their.

This memoir isn’t merely the story of his life but it’s the story of culture and politics in the United States and France for most of the 20th century and the beginning of this one. His family’s connections to the arts and culture (Vladimir was his father’s cousin) and his wife Claude’s family’s political connections (her father was an ambassador) kept Ivan at the center of what was happening in both spheres.

After studying at Harvard, meeting his wife Claude and starting a family, settling in Paris, and dabbling in the film industry (having assisted the director of Bonjour Tristesse), Ivan found his way into the publishing world first working at Editions Robert Laffont and then Reader’s Digest.

But it was when he was hired to acquire foreign fiction at Albin Michel that he began to really make his mark by making star American authors like Mary Higgins Clark and Stephen King huge successes in France.

He then went on to the group Presses de la Cité which at the time housed imprints such as Bourgois, Julliard and Plon. He talks about the experience of publishing Beloved (rejected first by Albin Michel), the complications of releasing Satanic Verses and being part of the international publishing contingent that saw Donna Tartt become such a huge success.

Ivan Nabokov’s memoir is a moving and charming memoir filled with entertaining anecdotes.

Ivan Nabokov was born in Strasbourg in 1932. After working in finance, he worked in publishing with a career that spanned over 40 years. He published the biggest names in foreign fiction including 8 Nobel prize winners.

Philippe Aronson is a French-American translator, interpreter and avid runner. His novel Un trou dans le ciel about the boxer Jack Johnson was published by Inculte in trade and 10/18 in mass market.

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