This book consists of two parts: “Little Masterpieces” (actually: “From the bottom of the box”) and “Transparent Things.” The first part includes American stories by Nabokov that he wrote from 1943 to 1951.
“Transparent Things” (1972) is a novella (or a small novel) in the late Swiss style. “Once it took me about forty years to invent Russia and Western Europe, and now I should have invented America,” Nabokov wrote in the afterword to “Lolita.” Now he was to “invent” a hotel-resort skiing Switzerland.