Excellent cultural and literary criticism of the 60-year old book and it impact on culture and what it says about society.A total pleasure to read what these smart, thoughtful writers have to say about Lolita.

Impressively diverse essays, well-balanced and provoking. One of the liveiest thread posed the question: could Lolita be published today? I'm psyched to reread the novel for the first time in years.

Quite a few outstanding essays in this collection, and almost every one worth a read.

some of the essays read as repetitive and obvious, but most of them didn't. lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta. the child and girl destroyed. imo, even in our currently political climate, i think lolita would be published.

Some of you, especially those of color, will not have heard of Vladimir Nabakov's 1957 novel Lolita. It shocks me too. The book is one of the most conspicuously vile portraits of an unapologetic pedophile you'll ever read and it's totally his viewpoint. I read it a decade ago and it inspired me to write a two or three act play I posted in Writer's Corner on epinions.com long before the site shut down. After reading 2021's Lolita in the Afterlife, maybe two dozen essays by writers and professors

[4.5 stars]“[Véra Nabokov] alone emphasized Lolita’s fate from the start. Over and over she stressed her “complete loneliness in the whole world.” She had not a single surviving relative! Reviewers searched for morals, for justifications, for explanations. What they inevitably failed to notice, Véra chided, was “the tender description of the child’s helplessness, her pathetic dependence on monstrous Humbert Humbert, and her heartrending courage all along.” They forget that “the horrid little bra...

Faves:Emily Mortimer - "Witness for the Defense: My Father and Lolita"Stacy Schiff - "Vera and Lo"Susan Choi - "Badge of Honor"Laura Lippman - "Watching the Detective"Lila Azam Zanganeh - "What We Talk About When We Talk About Lolita"Kate Elizabeth Russell - "Maison Nymphette"Kira von Eichel - "The Lollipop Room"

Like with any anthology, they’re not all standouts. I was particularly bugged by a few that did that ~twist~ of reimagining things from the perspective of another character (Charlotte Haze; Cheryl Strayed doing a Dear Sugar letter written by Lolita at age 80-something; groan) and I didn’t love that a couple were by writers who’d never actually read Lolita, were asked to contribute, read it and wrote a piece in the aftermath. Every other piece basically serves as a testament to why this is a book...

trigger warning(view spoiler)[ child rape, grooming, sexual assault, domestic violence, being drugged, kidnapping, mention of suicide, mention of genocide, trauma (hide spoiler)]What is says on the tin: This collection of essays is about the novel Lolita by Nabakov.You don't need to have read this to understand this collection.This was a hard read. It's been years since I read Lolita, and I was surprised to see that I needed closure - which this book provided. We have a multitude of opinions on...

Lolita is a masterpiece of a book. Reading more than 400 pages of essays about it sounded like a great time—and it was. Like essentially any essay collection, Lolita in the Afterlife (the "afterlife" is the post-#MeToo world, c/o Mary Gaitskill) had its ups and its downs. The variety of perspective is what most intrigued me, with authors from various different cultural backgrounds discussing the relevance the novel had on their own experiences, and how they process those experiences through the

I truly enjoyed this exploration of how different writers have come to encounter Lolita - each essay offered new insight and perspective to the story. Lolita is a fascinating novel, but one that comes under a lot of scrutiny (and rightfully so, sometimes!) - however, it is important to look into the way that it has impacted our culture and other cultures, and this collection does a good job of that.Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group for the chance to read this book.

Love it or hate it, Lolita is a book that stirs many perspectives. This anthology of nonfiction and fiction offers a variety of viewpoints on the book and the films, and is unputdownable.

I can't remember how old I was when I first read Lolita. But I know I was...confused...and probably too young. Later, at a more mature age, I had the occasion to listen to the audio book read by the wonderful Jeremy Irons, which also left me...confused, and as I no longer had the excuse of being "too young," (and by now had a proper English literature degree under my belt), I felt I perhaps just wasn't smart enough to "get it." What was the point? What did it mean? Was I wrong to enjoy it? What

Lolita stirs conflicted emotions in me that I am almost resigned to articulate. I am ecstatic that my favorite authors have eloquently done it for the world. I particularly liked the essays by Lauren Groff, Morgan Jerkins, Christina Baker Cline. I also appreciated the story about the showgirl who introduced Lolita to Minton, the father of the book's editor, written by Sarah Weinman. Tom Bissell's look into the two movie adaptations is fascinating. The essay that struck me as the best of all was

I love Lolita unabashedly, but as a feminist, I have to reckon with that. What I especially appreciate about these essays is that it felt like we’re all starting from the same jumping-off point: the book is brilliant. But. A must-read companion to the novel itself.

Since the start of the pandemic, I've lost count of how many virtual literary events I've attended. But the panel discussions I viewed online for this essay anthology really grabbed my attention. The contributors were an AMAZING list of authors! And they all seemed to be obsessed with the same book! A book--to my discredit--I'd never read.Step one: Read Lolita. Done! (Reviewed separately.) So, first, thank you for inspiring me to finally read a book that's been on my TBR for decades. It was a ri...

Worth a read, though some of the essays are considerably more astute than others.

I read this collection of essays about Lolita at the prompting of Rennie of What's Nonfiction and it was a great choice! As with most collections by multiple authors, some worked for me more than others, but there were a very few duds in this one. The editor did an incredible job selecting an array of essays that were diverse along many axes, yet all worked together. The authors are of different races, genders, sexualities, and nationalities. They bring perspectives from a variety of careers too...

I have read a lot about Lolita over the years. I was first drawn to the story when I caught the latter half of the Adrienne Lyon’s film, I think I was around 19 at the time, and was shocked at how the relationship between Dolores and Humbert was portrayed as a love story. I followed it up with the Kubrick version which was worse, and then sat down to read the novel. I found it a very difficult read - both for it’s subject matter and the language (I’m a simple girl and the style just wasn’t for m...

I read Lolita for the first and only time in my mid twenties. Like most, the experience stuck with me. However, it's not the sort of thing I've ever brought up in conversations about books because for me, there is so much out there more interesting to talk about than a story about a "sympathetic" pedophile. And yet, how it made me feel has. Always. Stuck. With me. So, when I became aware of this book I couldn't help myself (or didn't want to). I really wanted to know what other people out there