I got this because a former student was using it in a class. It's a collection of lectures Nabokov gave at Wellesley, where he taught for some years. Hard to imagine, but this excellent 20th century novelist was a very poor lecturer with (to me) a fairly naive critical eye. He goes on and on, for example, about the "genius" of RLS and Jekyll & Hyde, then dismisses Joyce's Ulysses with "he was a good writer." All in all, not a book for your Nabokov collection.