From these disparate parts, the contours of a single idea emerge. Roughly, this is it: "VN's happiness is a singular way of seeing, marveling, and grasping, in other words, of netting the light particles around us." Nabokov, Ms. Zanganeh suggests, invented a style of literary perception that retrieved an exceptional amount of beauty, and therefore happiness, from experience. This held true for all varieties of experience, even the grim stuff. "Even in darkness or demise, Nabokov tells us, things quiver with lambent beauty." How did he do it? "It has to do with the wiles of a new language," she hints. And then later: "A language recombining elements with such astonishing artistry and ardor as to obliterate the very limits of language as we knew it." Answer: Something to do with language.

These claims struggle to come into focus. "All it amounts to (in the end) is a certain way of looking," Ms. Zanganeh writes, 100 pages later. By the end of the book, she has reached this conclusion: "At core, the gift of the Nabokovian novel is this, just this: a call to whom-it-may-concern to capture photon after photon of fleeting life." Readers may be surprised by the literalness of this; photon is the key word. The Enchanter closes with a montage-like tribute to Nabokov's evocations of light: "Tentatively, I stepped over the lawn under the pale star-dusted firmament. And all at once it was summer. A radiant night, satiated with moonlight, as bright as an iridescent Persian poem."

Happiness this may be, but the light show, frankly, kind of makes you miss the peep show.

Nabokovians will be pleased to confirm that the master can still attract passionate disciples, but they may be nonplussed at how little The Enchanter adds to our understanding of him. Ms. Zanganeh has interviewed Nabokov's son, Dimitri, and she has made pilgrimages to various sites sacred to Nabokovians, where she recorded her impressions. That is all she has done. The rest of the material is secondhand. The Enchanter is a book that is mostly about reading other books.

Readers of The Enchanter familiar with Brian Boyd's life of Nabokov or Stacy Schiff's Vera will thus discover that they still remember much from those memorable works. There was the time Nabokov, out butterfly hunting, stepped on a sleeping bear (Mr. Boyd.) Then there was the time that a friend of Nabokov's father, having looked over Vladimir's adolescent love poetry, told him his son would "never, never be a writer." (Mr. Boyd, again.) There was what Vera, Nabokov's wife, said to their son Dimitri when Vladimir died: "Let's rent a plane and crash." (Ms. Schiff.) All of these are wonderful anecdotes, and all appear in The Enchanter. None of them is originally Ms. Zanganeh's. To her credit, Ms. Zanganeh is candid about her indebtedness to Mr. Boyd and Ms. Schiff; but then credit can only extend so far. All the showpieces in this book are out on loan.

What remains is Ms. Zanganeh's thesis on happiness. And it is true, Nabokov does rapture better than just about any other writer, ever. (He does rape, sadism and suicide pretty well, too.) Alas, Nabokovians tend to interact awkwardly with the conventions of literary criticism. Ms. Zanganeh calls her book "the true story of an ecstatic writer blended with the looking-glass fancy of a maniacal reader," and its method creative reading. Creative reading, as she means it, describes the attempt to channel a great writer's authority by imitating him in your writing about his writing. It is a form that is like pastiche, but equally like karaoke. Sometimes, at the micro-level, it is successful. "[T]he last, drawling days of August" is a phrase worthy of Nabokov, and it is all Ms. Zanganeh's. As a way of saying something meaningful about another writer, however, creative reading largely does not succeed. The Enchanter may make you want to read Nabokov, but it lacks insight into him.

This is not really Ms. Zanganeh's fault. Nabokov is a famous writer, but he deserves to be infamous as a disseminator of unhelpful dogmas about writing. His worst ideas, invariably, were about ideas. "Caress the details! The divine details!" Nabokov said. This is sound advice, if a little vague. What is not sound is this, something Nabokov also said: "Style and structure are the essence of a book; great ideas are hogwash." Nabokov dismissed Henry James as a "pale porpoise" and Joseph Conrad as a "writer of books for boys."

Nabokov is a towering genius; it is in the nature of Zeus to throw thunderbolts. Still, thunder echoes. Nabokov didn't believe in great ideas, but he did believe in patterns. And so Nabokovians believe in patterns, too. They believe in them messianically. They think the thrill of discerning a subtle pattern is the highest sensation that art, and possibly life itself, affords. Here is Ms. Zanganeh: "To observant men, these Nabokovian patterns, magically, will offer the inkling of an 'otherworld,' the ineffable beauty and concord of which is cause for infinite happiness." The most compelling statement of this position appears in Nabokov's book on Gogol, where he defines art as "the dazzling combination of drab parts." (Adam Thirlwell made this phrase the leitmotif of his excellent recent book The Delighted States.)

This point about drabness tends to get lost. Nabokovians talk about patterns, but what their writing usually suggests is an obsession with décor. Instead of dazzling combinations of drab parts, we get drab combinations of dazzling parts. I lost count of the number of times Ms. Zanganeh used the words "latticed" and "iridescent" and "limpid" and "whisper," and words like them. Here, for example, is Ms. Zanganeh describing Speak, Memory: "Everywhere, it seemed, blossomed sentences so new, yet which one believed to have whispered in a distant fold of time, under some latticed shade." This is beautified writing, not beautiful writing.

But it is also recognizably Nabokovian. "Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov," Geoff Dyer wrote in The Guardian last year. The paradox of an imposing style like Nabokov's is that when it is misfiring, it becomes more imposing. The swankier, crankier and hokier Nabokov's writing got, the more seductive it got. In 1969, in the midst of giving Ada a bad review, John Updike noted, "This deadly style is infectious!" Updike thought Nabokov's style had gone sour; but he was imitating it anyway, helplessly. "We read to reenchant the world," Ms. Zanganeh declares. And so we do. But the unromantic truth may be that successful writing, even if done in the name of creative reading, requires disenchantment. If you are going to cast a spell, you cannot be under one yourself.

editorial@observer.com

“They are not available (and will not be available),” Mr. Bogaards said in his note. “We have instead printed two sets of page proofs and are inviting media colleagues to preview them at our offices. They are not leaving the building.” 

Evidently aware of the power of advance galleys to attract attention in public settings, Mr. Bogaards added: “If you were to chance upon someone with a set of the Laura page proofs and the moment turned amorous, I would urge a note of caution.”

For years, Nabokov’s son Dmitri indicated that, per his father’s dying wishes, Laura would never see the light of day. Then last spring he had a change of heart and entrusted the super-agent Andrew Wylie to find a publisher. Knopf secured the rights for an undisclosed sum, and a publication date was set for this coming fall. When Amy Grace Loyd, Playboy’s literary editor since 2005, heard the news, she began an intense courtship process. “I did it with orchids, mostly,” Ms. Loyd said.

It was an inspired method, the flowers serving as a reference to Nabokov’s 1969 novel Ada, or Ardor, which was excerpted in Playboy—thus a reminder for Mr. Wylie of the magazine’s long and treasured association with the author. “It was part of my pitch to Andrew that Nabokov really liked publishing with Playboy, and how devoted Hef is to Nabokov and his legacy,” Ms. Loyd said.

Mr. Wylie was initially unresponsive.

“I would get nice notes back from him, but he really wouldn’t give me anything,” said Ms. Loyd, who’d curated a special feature marking the 50th anniversary of Nabokov’s Lolita as part of her tryout for the job. “He said he wasn’t sure that Playboy was the place to launch the novel in the United States. But I was very persistent, as I often am, and I try forcibly to remind people of our literary history because it is very easy for people to dismiss us.”

At the end of May, Mr. Wylie wrote to Ms. Loyd offering her second serial—meaning another magazine would publish an excerpt of their choosing before the book’s publication, and Playboy could do something a few weeks later.

Ms. Loyd was disappointed, figuring the honor of first serial was more likely to go to a place like The New Yorker, which had its own long history with Nabokov, and had in fact just last summer published one of his newly translated short stories. Ms. Loyd’s worry was not unfounded: Mr. Wylie had indeed sent Laura to the The New Yorker months earlier. But as it happened, according to a source at the magazine, the fiction department was not interested. (Fiction editor Deborah Treisman had no comment.)

On the first of June, Mr. Wylie changed his tune and wrote to Ms. Loyd asking her what, hypothetically, Playboy would be willing to pay for an exclusive.

“I decided to pull out all the stops,” Ms. Loyd said, and arranged with Playboy editorial director Jimmy Jellinek to get a green light from Mr. Hefner.

There were a few sticking points in the negotiation, chiefly the fact that Mr. Wylie wanted Ms. Loyd to give an offer on the book without first reading a page of it. But “I knew because of Nabokov’s genius, even if the manuscript was even more messy than it actually is, I would probably still be content,” Ms. Loyd said.

Terms were finalized during the third week of June. “I’m happy to tell you we’ve never paid this much for a book excerpt before, ever,” Ms. Loyd said, adding: “There are parts of it that are much more cohesive than others. But I found it fascinating in that way.”

The plan right now is for a 5,000-word excerpt to run in Playboy’s December issue, which arrives on stands on Nov. 10—about a week before Knopf will ship the book to stores.

“I’m so glad all those orchids did not die in vain,” Ms. Loyd said. “I don’t imagine anybody’s taking good care of them over there.”

Mr. Wylie had no comment on the transaction.

None of which should be news to anyone who read this Vanity Fair item from last April, in which Nabokov's son Dmitri—whose decision to publish Laura in spite of his father's instructions to burn it—described the book's plot in much greater detail than he's doing now that The Independent has moved him to "finally Error: Break shortcode syntax invalid his silence" about the book's contents.

Speaking of breaking silences, did we mention that Laura will be published by Knopf? Because it will be. Unclear when, because the person overseeing the project— LuAnn Walther, the editorial director of Knopf's paperback imprint Vintage—has been declining to comment on it ever since Andrew Wylie, the agent on the Nabokov Estate, agreed to sell Knopf the rights back in July.

As far as we know the ink on the contract might not be all the way dry (it wasn't as late as September), but the working assumption at Knopf seems to be that Laura is, for all intents and purposes, theirs.

Ellen Pifer, author of Vladamir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, will kick things off with a "Lolita's Wild Ride" talk to discuss the author's inspiration for the story. Other name-y Nabokov writers and journalists will chat up "Lolita in American Literature" and "Lolita in World Literature" in two seperate panels. Former Observer writer and current Slate columnist Ron Rosenbaum will participate in a panel about "Lolita, Laura and the Burning of Books" in the afternoon (just after the 3:30 tea time break).

“Visualizing Lolita,” an exhibition of works representing Parsons students’ responses to the characters and themes of Nabokov's novel, will be held in the Illustration department too.

That's a whole lot of Lolita! And there's MORE here.

Linda Dunne, dean of the New School for General Studies, said in a press statement: “It’s so fitting that The New School, with its long and distinguished history of embracing scholars and thinkers from around the world, should host this event. The participation of a wide range of disciplines from across the university reflects the enormous impact that Lolita has had on our cultural life."

It all goes down late September.

Sometimes, though even tired nicknames are apt. Mr. Wylie certainly lived up to that kitschy little epithet last week when he poached three huge writers—Chinua Achebe, Roberto Bolaño and Vladimir Nabokov—from other literary agents and added them quietly to the client list that is posted triumphantly on his Web site.

Of these three giants, only Mr. Achebe is still alive. And at 77 years old, he is apparently quite frail and unlikely to produce another major work. Rights to the books he has already written, however, including Things Fall Apart, will be in play before too long, and you can be sure that when the time comes, the Wylie Agency will be aggressive about selling them all over the world for maximum return. Mr. Achebe’s previous agent, Emma Sweeney, could not be reached for comment.

Fresh material could still come from Bolaño, however, even though he has been dead since 2003. According to Jonathan Galassi of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, who acquired American rights to the Chilean author’s The Savage Detectives and 2666 from the estate’s previous agent, Carmen Balcells, it is possible that Bolaño left behind a substantial amount of work that has not yet seen the light of day. “Apparently, there are other manuscripts,” Mr. Galassi said, “but I don’t know what they are.”

It’s a different story with Nabokov, whose final novel, The Original of Laura, has recently become one of the most famous—even mythic—unpublished works of the 20th century. In April, Nabokov’s 74-year-old son, Dmitri (henceforth, Mr. Nabokov), announced his intention to publish Laura—which is written on 138 index cards—instead of burning it up, as his father had requested just before his death in 1977. The Nabokov estate, as a result, is quite a prize indeed.

Until last week, the honor of placing Laura with a publisher rested with the New Jersey-based agent Nikki Smith, who has been faithfully representing the Nabokov estate since 1986. Ms. Smith had already submitted Laura to Knopf when Mr. Nabokov decided to do the deal through Wylie instead; as of Monday afternoon, when Pub Crawl reached Mr. Nabokov by phone in Palm Beach, he still hadn’t made up his mind about where the book should go. “There are several possibilities,” Mr. Nabokov said. “Many people are interested.”

He is shopping the book not just in America but worldwide—not surprising, given Mr. Wylie’s robust international operation. According to Mr. Nabokov, the French translation of Laura will probably be published by Gallimard; the Italian by Adelphi Edizioni; and the German by Rowohlt. As for the American rights, at press time, Mr. Nabokov said, “There is no news yet. I suggest you call my agent, Andrew Wylie.”

Attempts to contact Mr. Wylie, who was traveling this week, were unsuccessful.

Knopf editor (and Vintage/Anchor publisher) LuAnn Walther, who apparently had been in talks with Ms. Smith before the Nabokov estate was moved to Wylie, did not return calls.

neyfakh@observer.com

That agent is Andrew Wylie, who is as famous for his expert handling of posthumous work by heavyweights like Saul Bellow, Lionel Trilling and Richard Yates as he is infamous for his tendency to lure high-profile clients away from less powerful agents.

It is unclear whether Nikki Smith of New Jersey-based agency Smith-Skolnik Literary Management, who has repped the Nabokov Estate since 1986, is still involved, or how far she got in the process of finding a publisher for Laura before Mr. Wylie was brought on board.

Unclear also which publishers have already seen the manuscript of Laura—though Knopf, which owns a large portion of Nabokov’s backlist, is among them. The Smith-Skolnik agency fielded several offers for Laura after Nabokov's son, who is 73, announced his intention to publish it (instead of burning it or locking it in a private archive) back in April. A few of these even offered to buy the book without reading it first.

Reached by phone this afternoon, Ms. Smith said, "We are not answering any questions," and hung up.

The original manuscript of the book takes the form of 138 index cards—Nabokov wrote all of his first drafts on index cards—each of which contains about 150 words of prose. Before his death in 1977, Nabokov instructed his wife and son to destroy the cards because the book was unfinished, and his son publicly grappled with those instructions for about 15 years before finally deciding that his father wouldn’t be so sore if he went ahead and published it.

Nabokov scholar and biographer Brian Boyd told The Observer in April that a collection of unpublished letters, a few plays, and a compilation of interview transcripts and book reviews that Nabokov wrote early in his career for The New York Sun and The New Republic would eventually see the light of day. Presumably—though we can't say for sure—Mr. Wylie will eventually handle these projects as well.

A book of poems, titled Verses and Versions, will be published by Harcourt-Houghton Mifflin in the fall.

Mr. Wylie could not be immediately reached for comment.

Mr. Thirlwell writes that he sometimes thinks of The Delighted States as "an inside-out novel, with novelists as characters … about the art of the novel." It’s about style and translation and "a system of interlinked revisions and inspirations"—any cute connection between any avant-garde novel or novelist from the last 400 years that happens to have caught the eye of young Adam Thirwell, who was born in 1978; is the author of one novel, Politics (2003); and is a Fellow of All Souls College and Oxford (in other words, he’s clever). If you flip the book over, you get his translation of a Nabokov story called "Mademoiselle O," an item Nabokov wrote in French and rewrote in English (several times) and in Russian. (In one version, "Mademoiselle O" is chapter five of Speak, Memory.)

A trivial error troubled me, a paragraph that began, "Nearly thirty years after Flaubert’s death in 1880, on 14 August 1919. …" No literary critic needs to be good at math, but you want to be extra careful when the exact M. Flaubert is in your sentence—and sloppiness has a way of spreading. Luckily, Mr. Thirlwell, who has a habit of referring to his own book as though it were a force of nature somehow beyond his control, is a forgiving kind of guy: "The Delighted States, let’s remember, is written with a full acceptance of the mistake, the anachronism, the side effect."

And yet he’s plenty harsh on Samuel Beckett, who appears for an instant, has his wrist slapped for his "impossible" opinions about Joyce, then disappears entirely. How can a book about translation and international avant-garde style utterly disregard the work of a great Irish modernist who wrote in French and then translated himself back into English? I guess it’s Mr. Thirlwell’s playground, and he can invite who he likes.

I have my doubts, too, about Mr. Thirlwell’s talents as a translator. When he quotes Nabokov on the crucial topic of exile—"Je suis dépaysé partout et toujours"—he offers this translation: "I am adrift everywhere and always." I can’t say that "adrift" is entirely wrong, but it’s not what Nabokov meant.

Most of the critical commentary is sound, some of it ingenious, but when he gets around to Kafka, Mr. Thirlwell allows himself this howler: "The missing word in Kafka’s famous story ‘Metamorphosis’—where the travelling salesman Gregor Samsa wakes up to discover he has been transformed into a beetle—is ‘dream’: if Gregor could only find his way to the word ‘dream,’ then he would be calmed." Surely, the horror of "Metamorphosis" is that it cannot be dismissed as a dream. There, there, Gregor, it’s all just in your head.

In the British press, a few of the reviews of The Delighted States were scorching, suffused with sadistic glee—the caning of a smarty-pants schoolboy. But A.S. Byatt, writing in the Financial Times, liked it a lot. I read it eagerly, with admiration for Adam Thirlwell’s daring; I was more often dazzled than dismayed.

The agent Mr. Nabokov has been working with would not say which houses have expressed interest in The Original of Laura, though you can be sure that Knopf, which publishes a large chunk of the Nabokov backlist, is getting a look. Several publishers have already made blind offers.

Other previously unpublished Nabokov materials that will be published in the near future, according to Nabokov scholar, friend and biographer Brian Boyd: a collection of Russian verse he translated into English, out from Houghton Mifflin-Harcourt next fall; a collection of letters he wrote to his wife “which are marvelously lyrical and full of acute observation”; a couple of his plays; a collection of interview transcripts and book reviews he wrote early in his career for New York papers like The Sun and magazines like The New Republic. The poetry collection will be the third and final book in a three-book deal the Nabokov estate signed with Harcourt, which means all that other new stuff will be up for grabs.

“I remember hearing on the Boston radio, they were discussing the term ‘public intellectual,’” said Ms. Zanganeh, 29, in her precise, plummy English. “Perhaps being a public intellectual is being able to write, but also to be connected to the world. I mean, it sounds almost childish, but I would say that’s really, really my dream. And I hope that I can do it. I don’t have unrealistic expectations.”

Ms. Zanganeh represents a curious phenomenon in the New York literary world: the intellectualite, a person with highbrow aspirations who attends enough parties to make David Patrick Columbia’s head whirl. She turns up everywhere—at the annual P.E.N. gala, The Paris Review’s booze-soaked bacchanals, cocktail gatherings at the New York Public Library and myriad readings and talks, as well as any place where Salman Rushdie and his wife Padma are likely to drop by. And she seems to know everyone that it takes other people 10 years to meet.

“The New York literary world is incredibly monocultural,” said her friend and occasional editor Adam Shatz, The Nation’s literary editor. “But I think that when someone like Lila walks into the room, people wake up. They’re confounded and fascinated, because they don’t know people like her. And she has a sense of style that is woefully lacking in these parts.”

In this regard, Ms. Zanganeh, who was born to wealthy Iranian parents and raised in Paris, seems to hail from another era—or another continent, where the idea of a glamorous smart person isn’t an oxymoron. Ms. Zanganeh’s command of the role is intuitive. Tall and delicate, with a girlish voice, she speaks five languages and has a taste for dramatic makeup—generous amounts of mascara and lips painted a glossy red—and she always wears her hair parted down the middle in a distinctive black braid. She was educated at the elite École Normale Supérieure in Paris, where many of France’s academics are trained (she wrote her master’s thesis on Lolita), and she takes to the public stage like a soprano to Sondheim.

Naturally, ambition is part of the package. When she is not circulating among the New York literati, Ms. Zanganeh is interviewing its elders for Le Monde des Livres, the literary supplement of France’s leading newspaper, and occasionally for other European periodicals. (She has written articles about Mr. Rushdie, Paris Review editor Philip Gourevitch, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus, Yale scholar Harold Bloom, Gore Vidal and Jonathan Safran Foer, among others, and her interview subjects often become friends, mentors or even assign her stories.) Last November, she organized a fund-raising reception for victims of the Pakistan earthquake at the Asia Society and persuaded several former subjects to participate. (The keynote speaker was Hillary Clinton.)

That such a person would choose to make her name in New York at a time when America is reviled the world over is somewhat comforting. “I actually miss Europe very much. I adore Europe in many, many ways,” said Ms. Zanganeh, who favors words such as “extraordinary” to refer to things she likes. “In America, at every level you have people constantly saying, ‘Well, why not this? Why not that?’ I thought that it was energetic. I wanted to do so much, but in Europe I couldn’t really do it.”

She described present-day France as “very medieval,” and said that when she’d attempted to volunteer for Amnesty International there, for example, no one would return her phone calls. (Despite the fact that she was born there and comes off as absolutely Parisian, Ms. Zanganeh said that at home she is looked upon as a foreigner and is not considered to be truly French.) New York, on the other hand, was downright hospitable: When she wanted to write a story about Nabokov for The Times, she simply dialed up Steven Erlanger (then the newspaper’s culture editor) and made her pitch.

“And you know what he said? He wrote back and said, ‘Why not?’ And I was off to Geneva,” Ms. Zanganeh said (she’s currently applying for a green card). “That, for me, could only happen in America—this feeling of childlike energy. There’s this cliché that Americans are always optimistic, but it’s true. Americans are always so much more optimistic than the French. In France, nothing’s quite possible.”

AROUND 8 P.M. ON WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, Ms. Zanganeh was planted on the stage at the New York Public Library with four hot Iranian women in chic black outfits, moderating a discussion about her first book, an anthology she edited called My Sister, Guard Your Veil; My Brother, Guard Your Eyes: Uncensored Iranian Voices. The mission of the book had been to “challenge Western (mis)perceptions about Iran,” and the contributors were explaining that they appreciate literature and makeup and hate being thought of around the world as bomb-toting Arabs. The audience was swirling with Middle Eastern women dripping with jewels and neo-intellectual men gawking at them (“No wonder they keep them covered up,” remarked one male writer). There was also a hint of European royalty: The designer Diane von Furstenberg was draped over a chair in the front row, with the French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy not far behind. (Both are friends of Ms. Zanganeh’s.)

Before a packed auditorium, Ms. Zanganeh performed with extreme poise, although some in attendance found the event frustratingly light on the subject of politics. At one point, during a conversation with Azar Nafisi, a fellow “Nabokovian” and the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran, Ms. Nafisi pointed to the fancy Persian ladies in the front row and burst out with: “These are Iran’s weapons of mass destruction!”

The night before, Ms. Zanganeh had attended P.E.N.’s black-tie gala at the Museum of Natural History with Ms. Nafisi. The next week was packed with events for P.E.N.’s festival of international literature; in between there were media appearances on NPR and CNN to promote the Iran book, as well as the book’s launch party.

However, Ms. Zanganeh was already feeling burned out on Iran. “After this, I don’t believe I will write about Iran for some time,” she said, explaining that she is wary of “the quintessential American intellectual trap” of being expected to write only about your own kind. “It was just bizarre for me—Iranians on Iranians, Arab-Americans on Arab-Americans, fat people on fat people. I thought, ‘That’s strange—I want to write about Africa, I want to write about anti-Semitism, about French literature …. ’”

As they were shopping the proposal for the anthology, publishers kept suggesting that Ms. Zanganeh simply write a memoir, which inflamed her. “I thought, ‘But I have no memoirs—I’ve never been to Iran!’” she said. “It’s just this trend; Iranian women have to write their memoirs of Iran. I thought it was a bad joke. ‘What are you talking about? Memoirs? No. No way.’”

Her next project, in addition to her journalistic contributions, will be a book about Vladimir Nabokov, which is her true passion. (Her agent is Nicole Aragi.) “My interest in Nabokov was really, purely a literary one. I just adore him,” she said, adding that any parallels between Russia and Iran were not the source of her admiration. “It took me four months to read Ada, or Ardor, because I read every page five times. I can’t read it normally—I can’t help it. I remember, just to give myself a break while I was reading Ada, I began reading The Invention of Solitude by Paul Auster, and it was like drinking water with a little bit of dust in it after having eaten the most exquisite kind of mille feuille, with all kinds of creams and the most refined pastry in the world.

“Just purely the language, the style … ,” she continued, becoming all dreamy-eyed, “I really have the feeling that [Nabokov] is phantasmagorique—it’s an imaginative, phantasmagoric landscape that belongs to me. That speaks to me. That is me. And it had nothing to do with Iran.”

HER FAMILY BACK-STORY IS appropriately intense. Ms. Zanganeh’s father founded Iran’s domestic airline under the Shah; the family left the country for France just prior to the revolution of 1979. Her mother—who writes Italian poetry in her spare time—escaped on the last Air France flight out of Tehran on the day that the Ayatollah Khomeini arrived.

Ms. Zanganeh’s mother taught her English by making her watch Hamlet with Laurence Olivier, and she also imparted Italian, Persian and French. But Ms. Zanganeh said she felt like a misfit for most of her youth. It wasn’t until she reached the Lycée Henri-IV, a demanding preparatory school (Jean-Paul Sartre is an alumni), that she finally felt comfortable.

“For the first time in my life I was actually happy, because I was with people who were exceptional, who were stimulating, they were funny, they were not conformist,” Ms. Zanganeh said. “For the first time I met students who thought it was interesting that I was Iranian. It wasn’t ‘Oh, my friends were dark and my parents were weird, and why did we speak with accents or foreign languages?’ It was like, ‘Oh, really—how exotic!’ And they began asking me questions about Persian poetry.”

After university, she spent two years as a teaching fellow at Harvard, then enrolled at Columbia’s School of International and Public Affairs in 2000. She thought she might want to go into television and spent a summer interning with CNN in Russia (CNN was “completely horrible,” but she “adored” Russia.) She also hated the BBC, where she was an intern. (“I certainly wasn’t going to do the blond lettuce hair.”) During this period, she took a class at Columbia’s journalism school and was inspired to try writing by its famously draconian instructor, the film critic Judith Crist.

“I had always thought before that I can’t write,” Ms. Zanganeh said. “The thing is also, when you study literature, I mean, how can you write? You know how bad it is, you know? I think this whole American thing gave me the humility to be able to write, meaning that the French think that writing comes with a stroke of genius—you have it or you don’t have it—and the Americans really see writing as a craft. And that way you can work and improve.”

On Saturday, April 29, Ms. Zanganeh was basking in these various turns of events at her book party. It was held in a penthouse apartment overlooking the Hudson that belonged to two corporate attorneys, Virginia Davies and Willard Taylor, whom Ms. Zanganeh had met through a former boss from an internship at NPR. She was wearing a little silk jacket with intricate buttons and a towering pair of pumps, and was boasting of a recent journalistic “get”: an exclusive interview for Le Monde with the Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, who was in town for the P.E.N. festival and who had allegedly backed out of an interview with The Times Magazine but had agreed to sit with Ms. Zanganeh. (Salman Rushdie had even told her that it was hopeless.)

“He’d been refusing everyone, apparently,” she told two male admirers. “I sent him an e-mail anyhow, and he agreed!” (She said that she found Mr. Pamuk to be extraordinary.)

“I’m sure he just took a look in your eyes,” joked one of her friends, a documentary filmmaker recently returned from Iraq. “I’m going to refrain from saying something sexist.” A moment later in the conversation, he said: “My ambition is nothing compared to this woman. She’s here to conquer the world.”

Le Cirque 3.0

On the afternoon of May 16, workers busily mopped, vacuumed and tidied up in preparation for the opening of the latest incarnation of Le Cirque, now located in the shimmering rotunda of celebrity-filled One Beacon Court.

Outside the soon-to-be-opened restaurant’s entrance, a sprawling white tent was erected for Manhattan’s art-loving elite, who would be attending the Whitney’s American Art Award gala later that evening. It seemed like, once again, Le Cirque was providing refuge for the city’s social set.

More than three decades have passed since Sirio Maccioni first opened the storied eatery in the Mayfair Hotel, and later relocated in the 1990’s to a larger space in the New York Palace Hotel. But the seasoned restaurateur is not slowing down just yet, and was on hand to deal with some finishing touches.

“You have to be crazy,” said Mr. Maccioni, of taking on yet another restaurant opening. “But it’s worth it!”

The Whitney fête is really just the pre-opening party, sort of a dry run for the gala event that Mr. Maccioni is hosting two days later. There are countless boldface names already confirmed for that event: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Martha Stewart, Ron Perelman, Donald Trump.

“We have 2,000 people coming Thursday night for the opening,” said Mr. Maccioni.

But on May 31, when the doors open for the public, Mr. Maccioni will have to appease the money set’s next generation.

“I want to do a restaurant where New Yorkers want to go a minimum once, or maybe twice, a week,” said Mr. Maccioni. “I think I know what New York people want. The people want to come in and feel at home.”

If by “home” one means fine dining amongst circus-inspired decorations, located in a glass-and-steel tower, then Mr. Maccioni might be in luck.

Once you enter the 16,000-square-foot restaurant, the main dining room is located to the left. Since the Whitney crowd will be eating under the tent outside, most of the dining-room tables were moved to the perimeter of the semi-circular room in order to vacuum the dark red carpet. (By Thursday, tables will be set with Greggio and Ricciarelli silver, Reidel stemware and Villeroy & Boch china). Also, a massive “big top” light shade covers the high ceiling, and miniature Alexander Calder–like, bent-wire sculptures adorn the walls.

Although still playful in the old Le Cirque manner, Mr. Maccioni’s longtime aesthetic guru, Adam D. Tihany, has made things oddly more mature in hopes of drawing in a younger crowd of affluent foodies.

“There is clearly an evolution when it comes to the look and the feel of the place,” said Mr. Tihany, who has worked on six restaurants with Mr. Maccioni beginning in the early 1980’s. “The original Le Cirque was more of a French style—where the circus motif was largely represented by murals of monkeys having tea parties and stuff like that. It was very 18th-century French-type décor.”

Upon leaving the dining room, more of the modern touches are evident.

“There is a 27-foot wine tower that is part of the complex,” said Mr. Tihany, regarding the tall white structure that—at this point—had yet to be filled with wine bottles. “We call it the iPod wine tower. It creates a very powerful focal point.”

Along with the wine tower, the restaurant’s glass bar is also located in the 140-seat café section.

“The bar itself is a magic bar,” said Mr. Tihany. “It has a dual personality. At night, it reveals colorful bottles that you cannot see during the day.”

In the back hallways of the restaurant leading to the bathrooms, custom wallpaper is printed with snapshots of Le Cirque’s cherished past, with pictures of Ronald Reagan, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sylvester Stallone and Henry Kissinger.

Past the famous-faces wallpaper and up the stairs, what Mr. Tihany considers the two sections of the restaurant—both the proper Le Cirque and the café—becomes dramatically apparent. Gazing down from the 80-person private-event mezzanine, the new setup provides a distinction from the restaurateur’s previous forays—not to mention that the “iPod wine tower” protrudes into the mezzanine, helping to unify the various spaces.

Overall, the design presents a stark contrast to Mr. Maccioni’s 1997 venture, the futuristic-sounding Le Cirque 2000.

“Le Cirque 2000 was really an exercise in creating tension between old and new,” said Mr. Tihany. “It’s not unlike how Italians deal with their monuments. They restore them, and then drive a Ferrari and park in the courtyard. It was that kind of dynamic.”

“It’s certainly a big departure from the old Le Cirque,” said Mr. Tihany. “It has grandeur, but it has grandeur in a contemporary key. I think that will appeal to the younger generation. It’s a modern restaurant.”

—Michael Calderone