These days, calling Andrew Wylie “the Jackal” is about as lame as calling Bruce Springsteen “the Boss” or Richard Nixon “Tricky Dick.” It’s an ancient fossil of a nickname masquerading as a mischievous inside joke, about as amusing as a Big Johnson t-shirt.

Sometimes, though even tired nicknames are apt. Mr. Wylie certainly lived up to that kitschy little epithet last week when he poached three huge writers—Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov—from other literary agents and added them quietly to the client list that is posted triumphantly on his Web site.

Of these three giants, only Mr.  read more »

Less than a month after Dmitri Nabokov announced, following years of indecision, that he would publish his late father Vladimir’s unfinished final novel, The Original of Laura, he has hired a new literary agent to represent the Nabokov Estate.

That agent is Andrew Wylie, who is as famous for his expert handling of posthumous work by heavyweights like Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling and Richard Yates as he is infamous for his tendency to lure high-profile clients away from less powerful agents.

It is unclear whether Nikki Smith of New Jersey-based agency Smith-Skolnik Literary Management, who has repped the Nabokov Estate since 1986, is still involved, or how far she got in the process of finding a publisher for Laura before Mr.  read more »

The word "dazzle" appears often and in many forms in Adam Thirlwell’s boldly self-indulgent The Delighted States (FSG, $30), which turns the history of the novel, from Cervantes to Nabokov, into an enchanted, borderless, timeless playground for the amusement of Mr. Thirlwell and any reader who succumbs to his charms (which I did, mostly). Much of the pleasure in Mr. Thirlwell’s book comes from the writers he quotes from and comments on—among them Laurence Sterne, Diderot, Flaubert, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, Witold Gombrowicz and Nabokov, who declared that masterpieces are made of "dazzling combinations of drab parts." Combine that dazzling crew in your playground, and you’re unlikely to have a drab time.  read more »

Vladimir Nabokov’s Laura, the unfinished novel he was writing at the time of his death, is being shopped to publishers and will probably have a home within a few weeks, according to the agent who oversees his estate alongside his 73-year-old son, Dmitri. Dmitri Nabokov—henceforth Mr.  read more »