Book News: Acing Nabokov, Reel Love: The New Yorker The Argentinian illustrator Isol has won this year's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, the biggest prize in children's literature. Edward Jay Epstein recalls how watching the movie instead of reading the book got him an "A" in Vladimir Nabokov's class at Cornell. Inside Sylvia Plath's little-known children's book, "The It-Doesn't-Matter Suit." Had I been an aspiring writer, I would have slumped to the floor and wept. But I wasn't; I was an aspiring dabbler, and the only thing that happened was that my mind stopped functioning. Helen Hazen recalls the time she got a letter from Jacques Barzun, asking her to write a book. The cheap, drivelling non-entity! And other comments Ayn Rand wrote in the margins of C. S. Lewis's "Abolition of Man." Ten authors who loved film adaptations of their work.