Vladimir Nabokov’s son Dmitri has told Germany’s Der Spiegel that he has finally decided to ignore his father’s instructions to burn his final manuscript, The Original of Laura, and will instead have it published. Dmitri said, “I’m a loyal son and thought long and seriously about it, then my father appeared before me and said, with an ironic grin, ‘You’re stuck in a right old mess – just go ahead and publish!’”

Dmitri has called the manuscript “the most concentrated distillation of [my father’s] creativity.”

As reported by the Guardian blog: “Nabokov’s last work will not be burned.”

Lolita is one of my favorite books of all time, and thanks to lovely marketing maven Janina Mak’s facebook post (where I found this), here’s a very excellent l’il feature from the Wall Street Journal of Nabokov’s redesigned backlist. To celebrate the publication of the author’s posthumous novel, The Original of Laura, artists and authors like Dave Eggers, Chip Kidd, and Peter Mendelsund (my personal favorite of the batch) have reimagined the author’s previous covers, all with a nod to Nabokov’s love of butterflies in framing them in specimen boxes. (speaking of specimen boxes and butterflies, for an incredibly terrifying pyschological suspense novel, I recommend John Fowles’s The Collector.)