Thomas Karshan is a lecturer at the University of East Anglia, where he teaches twentieth-century literature, especially games, nonsense, and parody. He is the author of Vladimir Nabokov and the Art of Play, the editor of Nabokov’s Selected Poems and the co-translator of Nabokov’s first major work, a Shakespearean verse-play called The Tragedy of Mister Morn. He is co-editing a large book on the history of the essay to be published by Oxford University Press, and is working on two other books: Undelivered Letters, a book about the resistance to the message in modern literature, and A Dictionary of Modern Life, a series of essays on the interlocking ambiguities of 100 words in contemporary speech.