A Kind of Common Madness: A Conversation with Liz Harmer
Two huge things happened to me when I was quite young: I went mad, and I fell in love, in relatively swift succession.
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Posts Tagged: Lolita
We Are Not Gods: Talking with Elizabeth Ellen
Elizabeth Ellen discusses her new story collection, HER LESSER WORK.
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Investigative but Intimate: A Conversation with Robert L. Shuster
Robert L. Shuster discusses his debut novel, TO ZENZI.
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We’re All Difficult Women Now: Talking with Avni Doshi
Avni Doshi discusses her debut novel, BURNT SUGAR.
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Setting Yourself Free: A Conversation with Alisson Wood
Alisson Wood discusses her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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What to Read When You Want to Read Lolita
Alisson Wood shares a reading list to celebrate her debut memoir, BEING LOLITA.
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Rumpus Exclusive: “The Warning Bell”
“You are so sexy,” he said. I met his gaze. And the warning bell rang.
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Curse of Beauty
My daughter is beautiful. I wanted to be beautiful. And isn’t she a reflection of me?
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What Is Vibrant and Hidden: A Conversation with Jenny Boully
Jenny Boully discusses her new book, Betwixt-and-Between: Essays on the Writing Life, construction of voice, occupying liminal spaces, and editing with sincerity.
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ENOUGH: As Though Nothing Had Happened at All
A Rumpus series of work by women and non-binary writers that engages with rape culture, sexual assault, and domestic violence.
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What to Read When You Want to Make America Great Again
Here is a list of books that help remind us what actually makes America great (hint: it’s not tax cuts).
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Jaimee Wriston Colbert
Life’s inequities can be cruel, but in the end we are all part of our communities; suffering though we may be, we are not alone.
...moreThe Rumpus Interview with Brian Booker
Brian Booker discusses his debut collection Are You Here For What I’m Here For?, giving characters strange and unusual names, and sleeping sickness.
...more“Debate/Discuss/Rend Garments”
Over at Electric Literature, Ryan Chapman interviews Teddy Wayne, whose third novel, Loner, seems to effortlessly blow by the clichés of the campus novel: as Ryan calls it, “the writer’s equivalent of the pop ballad.” Wayne begins by citing “non-campus” novels as influences—The Talented Mr. Riply, Lolita, Notes from Underground—and he’s clearly transcended college culture […]
...moreA Tumblr Full of Lolitas
On the Ploughshares blog, Mishka Hoosen explores the phenomenon of young women claiming for themselves the “nymphet” moniker on various Tumblr pages. Hoosen argues that it is more than simplistic fetishization of the themes induced by Nabokov’s Lolita—these women are owning their forbidden sexuality within the protections allowed them. Like the Lolita character, they claim this […]
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The Rumpus Interview with Annie DeWitt
Annie DeWitt discusses her debut novel, White Nights in Split Town City, the 90s, and the brutality of nature.
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Instructions for Replicating a Bad Summer
Compare yourself to a raw wound. Explain that everyone else is one too, whether they know it or not.
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No, Lolita
He wasn’t just my teacher. He was the rockstar teacher of our theater program.
...moreWomen are People—Who Knew?
…there is a canonical body of literature in which women’s stories are taken away from them, in which all we get are men’s stories. And that these are sometimes not only books that don’t describe the world from a woman’s point of view, but inculcate denigration and degradation of women as cool things to do. […]
...moreOdes to Lolita, the Sexuagenarian
It was like being marched through someone’s private idea of a perfect night, a night where I was the center but one that had curiously little to do with me at all—all of which is to say that in an equation of desire, the object of desire can be integral and incidental at the same […]
...moreSean Kilpatrick on Inspiration
Nicholas Rys interviews Sean Kilpatrick, author of Sucker June, on the creation of his characters, comparisons of the book to Nabokov’s Lolita, and how film inspires the writer: I came first to film like a neighing kinsman. Anyone could snicker at my picks in the holiest of fresh fields, our Man Bites Dog cinema. We […]
...moreLolita in the Seventh Grade
Over at the Paris Review, Nick Antosca writes what it felt like to read Nabokov’s Lolita as a 12-year-old boy: Even if I didn’t quite grasp the nature of my radical misreading of the novel—Humbert’s a predator, not a competitor—I understood that for the majority of readers it didn’t tend to provoke reactions like mine. How weird and fucked-up was I?
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The Rumpus Interview with David Lipsky
David Lipsky, whose book was recently adapted into the movie The End of the Tour, discusses his career as a writer and journalist as it’s evolved in the twenty years since his road trip with David Foster Wallace.
...moreLolita Landmarks
Over at Lit Hub, Rebecca Brill has traced Lolita’s 62 years of history “from transgressive lit to pop iconography,” from inception to Kubrick to Lana Del Ray’s obsession on Born to Die. Maybe we’re just a little closer to understanding the latter. But maybe not.
...moreThe End of Literature
The rapid rise of “trigger warnings” is starting to impact literature curriculums. For instance, Columbia University students lobbied to include warnings on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a core text in Western Literature syllabi. Columbia refused to include warnings, but essentially capitulated by expunging the text from its curriculum entirely. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita were […]
...moreAn American Writer from Russia
At the New Yorker, John Colapinto explores Nabokov’s quintessentially American classic, Lolita, and just how a Russian-born writer could so perfectly capture American culture as an emigre, working specifically with Robert Roper’s new biography on the great writer, Nabokov in America: On the Road to ‘Lolita.’ Of specific and extremely endearing interest: Nabokov’s obsession with […]
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stepfatherhood
“He was my real dad,” she says. “I just happened to have two.”
...moreBetter than the Book
Film adaptations can take their source novels in a million different directions, some innovative, others painfully off the mark. John Colapinto evaluates the movie versions of different Nabokov stories for the New Yorker, exploring their various formal challenges and triumphs.
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The Rumpus Interview with Gina Nahai
Gina Nahai talks about her fifth novel, The Luminous Heart of Jonah S., Iran and Los Angeles, and the possibility of a long-sought-after peace in the Middle East.
...moreThe Copycat Lolita
A few weeks before Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita came out, the New Yorker published a short story about a man consorting with a young woman named Lolita instead of her mother—but this story was by Dorothy Parker, whose career was entering its last-gasp phase. Wait, what? Really? Vulture explains how coincidence, indiscretion, and “an opportunity to sting the current […]
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