Lolita

Paperback / softback

Main Details

Title Lolita
Authors and Contributors      By (author) Vladimir Nabokov
SeriesPenguin Essentials
Physical Properties
Format:Paperback / softback
Pages:368
Dimensions(mm): Height 181,Width 110
Category/GenreModern and contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
ISBN/Barcode 9780241951644
ClassificationsDewey:FIC
Audience
General

Publishing Details

Publisher Penguin Books Ltd
Imprint Penguin Books Ltd
Publication Date 7 April 2011
Publication Country United Kingdom

Description

One of the best-known novels of the 20th century - the controversial story of Humbert Humbert who falls in love with twelve year old Lolita 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta- the tip of my tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.' Humbert Humbert is a middle-aged, frustrated college professor. In love with his landlady's twelve-year-old daughter Lolita, he'll do anything to possess her. Unable and unwilling to stop himself, he is prepared to commit any crime to get what he wants. Is he in love or insane? A silver-tongued poet or a pervert? A tortured soul or a monster? Or is he all of these?

Author Biography

Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977), born in St Petersburg, exiled in Cambridge, Berlin, and Paris, became the greatest Russian writer of the first half of the twentieth century. Fleeing to the US with his family in 1940, he then became the greatest writer in English of the second half of the century, and even 'God's own novelist' (William Deresiewicz). He lived in Europe from 1959 onwards, and died in Montreux, Switzerland. All his major works - novels, stories, an autobiography, poems, plays, lectures, essays and reviews - are published in Penguin Modern Classics.

Reviews

You read Lolita sprawling limply in your chair, ravished, overcome, nodding scandalized assent -- Martin Amis * Observer * A masterpiece. One of the great works of art of our age * Independent * His command of words, his joy in them, his comic and ecstatic use of them...makes reading his work such an intense joy * Daily Telegraph * Lolita is more the shocking because it is both intensely lyrical and wildly funny ... a Medusa's head with trick paper snakes * Time * A great novel ... It widens our own humanity * Guardian * There's no funnier monster in modern literature than poor, doomed Humbert Humbert. Going to hell in his company would always be worth the ride * Independent * Redeeming, spendid, headlong, endlessly comic and evocative -- John Updike Rapturous ... incendiary * Time Out *