The Coral Island are, in his own words, "adventure stories for young folks", and "The Coral Island" is no exception. It is a Robinsonade, a genre of fiction inspired by Daniel Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" (1719), one of the most popular of its type, and one of the first works of juvenile fiction to feature exclusively juvenile heroes. Susan Maher, professor of English, notes that in comparison to "Robinson Crusoe" such books generally replaced some of the original's romance with a "pedestrian realism", exemplified by works such as "The Coral Island" and Frederick Marryat's 1841 novel "Masterman Ready, or the Wreck of the Pacific".
Despair (novel) similar fashion, Julian Connolly calls "Despair" “a cautionary tale of creative solipsism”. In 1978 the novel was adapted into the film "Despair", directed by the German film-maker Rainer Werner Fassbinder and starring Dirk Bogarde. Nabokov's novel was adapted by Tom Stoppard. Boyd, Brian. "Vladimir Nabokov: The Russian Years". Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir Vladimirovich. "Despair". New York, NY: Vintage International, 1989. Print. Despair (novel) Despair (, or "") is the seventh novel by Vladimir Nabokov, originally published in Russian, serially in the politicized literary journal "Sovremennye zapiski" during 1934. It was then published as a book