Sometimes the smallest detail can change the way you think about the world. This happened to me in 2009, when I read The Original of Laura —which consists of unedited fragments of Vladimir Nabokov’s unfinished last novel—and noticed that, after 35 years of writing in English, the author had still struggled to spell bicycle . I had imagined Nabokov’s leap away from Russian, his native language, as an instantaneous, effortless transformation, but now I realized that it must have been an ongoing