With one of the most controversial novels of the twentieth century Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita
is a strange troubling love story told by the one of the most unreliable narrators in
literature. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an afterword by Craig Raine. Poet and
pervert Humbert Humbert becomes obsessed by twelve-year-old Lolita and seeks to possess her
first carnally and then artistically out of love 'to fix once for all the perilous magic of
nymphets'. 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? Humbert Humbert's seduction is one of many dimensions in
Nabokov's dizzying masterpiece which is suffused with a savage humour and rich elaborate
verbal textures. Filmed by Stanley Kubrick in 1962 starring James Mason and Peter Sellers and
again in 1997 by Adrian Lyne starring Jeremy Irons and Melanie Griffith Lolita has lost none
of its power to shock and awe. Lolita is comedy subversive yet divine...You read Lolita
sprawling limply in your chair ravished overcome nodding scandalized assent. (Martin Amis
Observer).
