/ Book / Vladimir Nabokov

Softcover / 392 Pages - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - The first edition of Lolita appeared in Paris in 1955, published by Olympia Press, a publishing house with a renowned range of adult texts. The novel was banned in France and England, and was not published in the United States until three years later. Although it was immediately praised by writers such as Lionel Trilling and Graham Greene, the adjectives "scandalous," "immoral," "decadent," and "outrageous" long followed Lolita, now considered an undisputed masterpiece of world literature. The story of the obsession of Humbert Humbert, a forty-something professor, with the twelve-year-old Lolita is an extraordinary love story in which two explosive elements intertwine: the perverse attraction to nymphets and incest. A journey through madness and death, culminating in highly stylized violence, narrated with both self-irony and unbridled lyricism by Humbert Humbert himself. Lolita is also a sharp and visionary portrait of the United States, of suburban horrors, and of the plastic and motel culture. In short, a dazzling display of talent and humor from a writer who confessed he would have loved to film Lewis Carroll's picnics. No lover has ever thought of his beloved with such tenderness, no woman has been so rapturously evoked, with such grace and delicacy, as Lolita (Lionel Trilling). The funniest tragedy since Euripides' Hecuba (Howard Nemerov). It's a hilarious book of anagrams (W. H. Auden). The most satisfying, perhaps the only satisfying, work of erotic literature I've ever read... As our century enters its final years, the last laugh may be the best of all: the Great American Novel was written by a Russian (Alan Levy).