Speak, Lolita

Orville Prescott writing in The New York Times, 1958

Source: http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/books/20-bad-reviews-for-classic-books#gallery-10

Source: OpenCulture

eat your grammatical little hearts out: http://www.openculture.com/2014/03/opening-sentences-from-great-novels-diagrammed-lolita-1984-more.html

source: New York Magazine

read the full article in all its glory here: http://www.vulture.com/2014/01/best-punctuation-marks-literature-nabokov-eliot-dickens-levi.html

Vladimir Nabokov speaks on writing novels, his good friend Edmund Wilson, and something akin to hallucinations in a 1969 BBC Interview with James Mossman. Background and context: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/01/18/vladimir-nabokov-james-mossman-interview/

"He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader."

Edward Jay Epstein recounts his humorous experiences as Nabokov's student at Cornell in September of 1954.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/apr/04/a-from-nabokov/

Vladimir Nabokov on his novel Lolita. July 1962, BBC interview with Peter Duval-Smith and Christopher Burstall, from Strong Opinions

Bradley Cooper reads Lolita. (2006 GB Penguin Red Classics Edition)

Three weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, there was Dorothy Parker’s -- coincidence?

An excerpt from Dorothy Parker’s Lolita (left); a similar passage from Nabokov's Lolita (right).

By August of 1955, Nabokov's Lolita had been turned down by most American publishers. Eventually, Nabokov had placed the manuscript with a publisher in Paris—Olympia Press—and it was supposed to be coming out in September. Then, on August 26, he opened his New Yorker and saw Parker’s Lolita. 

The article below outlines the literary butterfly effect that led to two Lolitas:

http://www.vulture.com/2013/11/dorothy-parker-and-vladimir-nabokov-lolita.html

Nabokov outsnarks a critic of his first novel, Mashenka (Mary), published in 1926 under the pen name V. Sirin.

"Designing a cover for a controversial novel is always a fraught endeavor, but few novels come with as much visual baggage as Lolita. Nabokov’s daring story has confounded book designers from the beginning: the cover of the first edition, published in 1955, was solid green." 

"Of Lolita’s cover design Nabokov originally wrote to his publisher: 'I want pure colors, melting clouds, accurately drawn details, a sunburst above a receding road with the light reflected in furrows and ruts, after rain. And no girls.' He also said, 'Who would be capable of creating a romantic, delicately drawn, non-Freudian and non-juvenile, picture for Lolita (a dissolving remoteness, a soft American landscape, a nostalgic highway—that sort of thing)? There is one subject which I am emphatically opposed to: any kind of representation of a little girl.”

John Bertram, in what he called The Lolita Cover Project, recently commissioned designers to create new covers for Lolita, such as the one pictured above. The resultant cover designs can be found here:

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/08/designing-lolita.html#slide_ss_0=11

"Since the pencil’s introduction in the 1930s, the Blackwing has developed a cult following of artists, writers, and designers. Vladimir Nabokov preferred Blackwings for sketching out his novels on index cards, Truman Capote kept boxes of them on his nightstand, and John Steinbeck once declared the the pencil  'the best I have ever had.' (He used some 300 of them to complete East of Eden.)"

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/pageviews/2013/08/an-ode-to-the-blackwing-602-vladimir-nabakov’s-favorite-pencil-1

The opening of Nabokov's Lolita -- one of the most haunting passages I have ever read