Literature

After 34 years of censorship, "Lolita," Vladimir Nabokov's greatest creation and Russian emigre literature's most notorious scandal, will be published this spring in a special edition printed by the Soviet journal Foreign Literature. The world has grown accustomed to the liberalization of culture in the Soviet Union. But the case of "Lolita" is a landmark--not only of literature but also of morality.

Kenzaburo Oe, a Japanese enfant terrible who gave voice to a generation set adrift by the destruction of their values and dreams after World War II, won the Nobel Prize for literature, the Swedish Academy announced Thursday in Stockholm. Oe, 59, whose fiction is staunchly modern in both style and substance, marks a clear break from Japan's traditional aesthetics, represented by such celebrated writers as Yasunari Kawabata.

Think back to the last few weeks of college. Remember the all-night cram sessions? The paper-writing marathons? The 11th-hour scramble to wrap up that final research project? Now multiply that by four. That is what Keith Copsey's life is like these days. In two weeks, the 23-year-old from Camarillo will become the first UC Santa Barbara student to graduate with four bachelor's degrees simultaneously.

Marilyn Jachetti Whirry, a teacher of Advanced Placement English in Manhattan Beach who today will be named National Teacher of the Year, never intended to spend her life in front of a classroom. A more exotic line of work, she felt, would better suit her adventurous spirit. "I saw teachers as boring people," the 65-year-old dynamo said recently in her classroom at Mira Costa High School. "I had no desire to be like them."

The nominees for fiction in the 1990 National Book Awards include two first-time novelists and an 88-year-old author who completed his work in 1948 but could not find a publisher until last year. The nominees were announced Thursday by the National Book Foundation, the nonprofit organization that sponsors the annual awards. The fiction nominees include Felipe Alfau, an 88-year-old Spanish native who immigrated to the United States during World War I.

Patrick Fraley has a gift as old as parents and bedtime. He is one of the small community of actors who can bring an audiobook to life. The 52-year-old Studio City resident makes his living via commercials and cartoons. "Doing ducks, dogs and villains is my day job," said Fraley, who gives voice to the parrot on the TV series "Providence" and was Buzz Lightyear for numerous Pixar/Disney projects, including some 70 talking toys. But once a year, Fraley records an audiobook.

It began, as many things do, in a bar. An Oxford pub, circa 1940, called the Eagle and Child, or the Bird and the Baby to the locals. At Tuesday luncheons, one table was occupied by an odd assortment of men--a couple of middle-aged dons, a writer or two or three--who smoked and drank and read to each other from scratched-out, scrawled-down pages. The Inklings they called themselves.

An online service launched last week is expected to provide the largest electronic library for the blind and visually impaired on the Internet. Bookshare.org features more than 8,000 books--from New York Times bestsellers to the classics--that individuals can download and print in Braille or listen to using software that reads text aloud. As its name suggests, the site's collection is maintained by individuals who donate electronic copies of books they have scanned.

Was Hans Christian Andersen simply a talented writer of children's fairy tales, or should adults be probing his works for deeper meanings? Danish academics, believing there is more to their country's greatest author than most readers realize, held an international conference here to consider his work in an adult perspective--and were surprised at the results.

At prayer, at work and at play, a woman's experience of the divine is distinctive. What is changing, according to four new books on women's spirituality, is that voices silenced for centuries finally are being heard. Sifting through women's writings over those centuries means uncovering a wisdom, clarity, beauty and distinctiveness reflecting their corporate faith and experience, says Lucinda Vardley, editor of "The Flowering of the Soul, A Book of Prayers by Women" (Beacon Press).