Episode 71: Lolita, Part 1

Our Season Four two-parter is on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955), and there’s some truly gruesome material here. If you’ve ever wondered where a Vulgar Marxist and an As*hole with Fussy Modernist Aesthetics might diverge in opinion, it’s over this one. We talk about noveliness, comedy, being a reader (bad and good), and the book’s review genealogy. We roll our eyes over blunt commentary (Blanche Schwartzman, really) and nonstop Edgar Allen Poe references.

We read the Alfred Appel, Jr. Annotated Lolita (more on the annotations next week, yowza) published by Vintage. The scholarly engagements with this book are pretty terrible, so we recommend browsing around contemporaneous reviews (The National Review said, “[Nabokov] excoriates the materialist monstrosities of our civilization—from progressive education to motel architecture”) but maybe also check out this listicle of Lolita covers: https://lithub.com/the-60-best-and-worst-international-covers-of-lolita/ ?

Find us on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook @betterreadpod, and email us nice things at [email protected]. Find Tristan on Twitter @tjschweiger, Katie @katiekrywo, and Megan @tuslersaurus.