Playboy to excerpt Nabokov story

A novella written before his death by Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita, is to be published later this year, despite the author's dying wish in 1977 that the unfinished work be destroyed by his heirs.

An excerpt from the novella, The Original of Laura, will also be published by Playboy magazine which had a long association with the writer, serialising his 1969 novel Ada and publishing interviews with him about the controversy surrounding Lolita.

The serialisation deal is reckoned to be a coup for Playboy, which is trying to reestablish its long-held reputation as a publisher of literary works as well as girlie pictures. Amy Grace Loyd, the magazine's literary editor, said she had sent the agent Andrew Wylie a succession of orchids in her attempt to win him over to the idea of a Playboy excerpt.

"I would get nice notes back from him, but he really wouldn't give me anything," said Loyd. "He said he wasn't sure that Playboy was the place to launch the novel in the United States. But I was very persistent, as I often am, and I try forcibly to remind people of our literary history because it is very easy for people to dismiss us."

Wylie eventually agreed - but at a cost. "I'm happy to tell you we've never paid this much for a book excerpt before, ever," Loyd said.

The novella tells the story of an overweight academic in an unhappy marriage to a promiscuous woman. For years, Nabokov's son Dmitri (pictured above with his father in 1961) stuck by the author's wish that it should never be published. But last spring he apparently caved in and chose Wylie to market it.

Wylie is a notoriously tough operator. "I'm so glad all those orchids did not die in vain," Loyd told the New York Observer, certain that nobody at Wylie's agency would have bothered to take care of them. ·