The Annotated Lolita

Nabokov's wise, ironic, and elegant masterpiece. - A controversial love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness. - This annotated edition assiduously illuminates the extravagant wordplay and the frequent literary allusions, parodies, and cross-references. - Edited with a preface, introduction, and notes by Alfred Appel, Jr. Fascinatingly detailed. -Edmund Morris, The New York Times Book ReviewWhen it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. Awe and exhilaration-along with heartbreak and mordant wit-abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love-love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.