Lolita

Lolita was written in English by Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian-born novelist who had already published in Russian and was living and teaching in the United States, and it first appeared in Paris in 1955 under the Olympia Press imprint. Publishers in the United States and Britain were unwilling to take the book at the time, which is why the first edition was a Paris one, and the novel reached a wide English readership afterwards. Nabokov translated the book into Russian himself, and the Russian edition followed in 1967.

The novel is framed as a manuscript introduced by a fictional editor, John Ray Jr., who explains that the author died in custody before he could be tried for an unspecified crime. What follows is Humbert Humbert's own account, told in the vocabulary of a man who has read a great deal and very much wants to be believed. Nabokov writes the prose in English while keeping a foreigner's ear inside it: French puns, invented words and sentences that perform the charm the narrator cannot stop performing. The distance between what Humbert says and what the reader sees is the book's whole method.

The journey at the centre of the novel crosses the United States by car and motel, and the country is rendered in exact detail, from roadside signs and diners to small towns and national parks, while the relationship being described is a crime. Other people pass through the pair's orbit: Dolores's mother, a school, a playwright, and later a rival who takes the girl away, which is what sets the last part of the book going. The subject has made the novel the target of censorship attempts and of a long argument about narration and complicity, and it is regularly listed among the major novels of the twentieth century.