Lolita
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The 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…
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An 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…
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The Saturday Rumpus Essay: Stepfatherhood
“He was my real dad,” she says. “I just happened to have two.”
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Better 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.
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The 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…
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You Might Never Find Your Way Back: Shirley Jackson’s Hangsaman
There are other odd, improbable, tenuous connections, as if Hangsaman had a secret way of speaking to (or through) other artifacts beyond its time.
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Vladimir Nabokov and Lionel Trilling Discuss Lolita
“I think it’s shocking. I’m glad it’s shocking.” (via The New Republic) Part two is here.
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The Rumpus Sunday Book Blog Roundup
I was out last week on vacation, but I’m back. And there’s a lot to catch up on. Here goes … In Turkey, you can go to jail for using the letters Q, W and X. (via) Even Bill and…
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Kubrick’s 1961 Lolita is the First 70s Movie
The other day I read a rambling but entertaining essay over on Bright Lights Film Journal, called All Tomorrow’s Playground Narratives, which analyzed Kubrick’s Lolita in terms of — well, approximately anything that occurred to the guy, it would seem.…