Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause celebre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty...

Nabokov offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures in a 999-line poem by the reclusive genius John Shade.

Classic literature of duality between good and evil.

Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969), the longest of Nabokov's novels, is a witty and parodic account of a man's lifelong love for his sister. All of his favorite themes and most characteristic techniques are woven into this culminating work of Nabokov's imagination. Transparent Things (1972) is a haunting novella of the anguished life of Hugh Person, a young American editor and proofreader: his marriage, the murder of his wife, and his lone journey...

First publication of an index-card diary in which Nabokov recorded sixty-four dreams and subsequent daytime episodes, allowing the reader a glimpse of his innermost life.

Stanley Kubrick's sixth film is a brilliant, sly adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov's celebrated yet infamous 1955 novel. It chronicles a middle-aged literature professor's unusual and doomed sexual passion/obsession for a seductively precocious pubescent "nymphet" named Lolita. Thanks to the film industry's production code, the film is mostly suggestive, with numerous double entendres and metaphoric sexual situations, while the story has been transformed...