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The Annotated Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
In 1954 Vladimir Nabokov asked one American publisher to consider "a firebomb that I have just finished putting together." The explosive device: Lolita, his morality play about a middle-aged European's obsession with a 12-year-old American girl. Two years later, the New York Times called it "great art." Other reviewers staked a higher moral ground (the editor of the London Sunday Express declaring it "the filthiest book I've ever read"). Since then, the sinuous novel has never ceased to astound. Even Nabokov was astonished by its place in the popular imagination. One biographer writes that "he was quite shocked when a little girl of eight or nine came to his door for candy on Halloween, dressed up by her parents as Lolita." And when it came time to casting the film, Nabokov declared, "Let them find a dwarfess!"
The character Lolita's power now exists almost separately from the endlessly inventive novel. If only it were read as often as it is alluded to. Alfred Appel Jr., editor of the annotated edition, has appended some 900 notes, an exhaustive, good-humored introduction, and a recent preface in which he admits that the "reader familiar with Lolita can approach the apparatus as a separate unit, but the perspicacious student who keeps turning back and forth from text to Notes risks vertigo." No matter. The notes range from translations to the anatomical to the complex textual. Appel is also happy to point out the Great Punster's supposedly unintended word play: he defends the phrase "Beaver Eaters" as "a portmanteau of 'Beefeaters' (the yeoman of the British royal guard) and their beaver hats." [via]
More editions of The Annotated Lolita:
- The Annotated Lolita: ISBN 0679727299 (0-679-72729-9)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
Belinda
by Anne Rice, Anne Rampling

ISBN 0425176657 (0-425-17665-7)
Softcover, Berkley Pub Group

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More editions of Belinda:
- Belinda: ISBN 0515093556 (0-515-09355-6)
  Softcover, Berkley Pub Group
- Belinda: ISBN 0425176657 (0-425-17665-7)
  Softcover, Berkley Pub Group
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Belinda
by Anne Rampling

ISBN 0877958262 (0-87795-826-2)
Hardcover, Gage Learning Corporation

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Book summary:
An erotic and controversial tale of seduction and obsession from the best-selling author of Exit to Eden. Belinda is the ultimate fantasy. A golden-haired object of desire, fresh and uninhibited. But to Jeremy Walker, a handsome and famous 44-year old illustrator of children's books, Belinda is a forbidden passion, both beguiling and bewitching. [via]
More editions of Belinda:
- Belinda: ISBN 0877958262 (0-87795-826-2)
  Hardcover, Gage Learning Corporation
The Enchanter
by Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Dmitri Nabokov

ISBN 0679728864 (0-679-72886-4)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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More editions of The Enchanter:
- The Enchanter: ISBN 0399132112 (0-399-13211-2)
  Hardcover, Putnam Pub Group
- The Enchanter: ISBN 0679728864 (0-679-72886-4)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
Fortune's Rocks
by Anita Shreve

ISBN 0316678104 (0-316-67810-4)
Softcover, Little Brown & Co

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Book summary:
Hester Prynne never had it so good! The year is 1899, and Olympia Biddeford, the headstrong daughter of a Boston Brahmin family, has decided to test the limits of her cloistered world. Spending the summer at her father's New Hampshire estate, the teenage heroine of Fortune's Rocks is entranced with the visiting salon of artists, writers, and lawyers. She's especially captivated, however, by John Haskell, a charismatic physician who ministers to the blue-collar community in the nearby mill towns. This middle-aged Good Samaritan hires Olympia to assist him as a nurse, and their collaboration soon evolves into a fiery love affair. Alas, it's only a matter of weeks before this passionate exercise in managed care is exposed--with disastrous consequences for the young, impregnated heroine. Even her adoring father now considers her "an overplump sixteen-year-old girl whose judgment can no longer be trusted," and insists that she break off her relationship:
"There is nothing more to be said on this subject," he says. She bites her lip to keep from crying out further. She holds the arms of her chair so tightly she later will have cramps in her fingers. She will refuse to obey him, she thinks. She will accept his implied challenge and set off on her own. But in the next moment, she asks herself: How will she be able to do that? Without her father's support, she cannot hope to survive. And if she herself does not survive, then a child cannot live."
In the end, Anita Shreve's seventh novel is a polished, supremely entertaining variation on Wuthering Heights, with Olympia and Haskell sitting in for Catherine and Heathcliff. The author did some meticulous research for her New England background, which gives this study of one particular wayward woman some extra historical heft. Some readers may find the plot twists a bit pat. And despite Olympia's efforts to be an independent woman, she overcomes her trials largely as a result of her family's wealth and station, which takes the edge off Shreve's feminist message. Still, Fortune's Rocks is a romance in the classic sense of the word, and should be enjoyed as such, unless the reader is absolutely allergic to happy endings. --Ted Leventhal [via]
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Kamikaze Girls
by Akemi Wegmuller, Nobara Takemoto

ISBN 1421502690 (1-4215-0269-0)
Hardcover, Viz

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- Kamikaze Girls: ISBN 1421502690 (1-4215-0269-0)
  Hardcover, Viz
Lo's Diary
by Ann Goldstein, Pia Pera

ISBN 0964374013 (0-9643740-1-3)
Hardcover, Foxrock

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- Lo's Diary: ISBN 0964374013 (0-9643740-1-3)
  Hardcover, Foxrock
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Lo's Diary
by Pia Pera

ISBN 0964374021 (0-9643740-2-1)
Softcover, FoxRock, Incorporated

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Book summary:
After much legal wrangling with Nabokov's estate, Pia Pera's Lo's Diary has found its way to America. Imagining the inner life of Nabokov's Lolita, Pera shows a good degree of irreverent audacity, something that is often missing in feminist "re-imagining" of the patriarchal past--historical or literary. While American Women's Studies classes teach us that Lolita is a victim, caught in a terrible net of adult desire, in this Italian writer's version, Lolita is a petty, self-centered girl who is driven by lust, boredom, the desire to be looked at constantly. She's also a skilled sadist, torturing animals, men, her mother. When Lo leaves for camp, she runs upstairs to hug poor, pathetic Humbert: "he holds me away to see me better, with a tragic-emotional look (he's always getting that look, because of the gutless poetry he studies), and I bring my lips close to his. End of film." While the publishers claim Pera is seeing Lolita through the lens of a "new feminist consciousness," it reads more like that of fashion magazines, soap operas, bitchy girl talk.
In order to avoid a copyright infringement lawsuit, Pero's American publisher agreed that Nabokov's son, Dmitri, could write a preface. And it is a scathing statement indeed, issued from the heights of literary snobbery. Nabokov writes condescendingly of "Pia Pera (henceforth PP), an Italian journalist and author of some stories that I have not read." He ends with this statement: "Whether [the book] draws well or badly from Lolita I leave for you to judge." In e-mail exchanges with The New York Times, Pera called the preface "a disappointingly dull emulation of his father's mastery of irony and, on occasion, virtuoso contempt."
Lo's Diary is no masterpiece, by any means. Its prose is flatly realistic, pulling Nabokov's wildly poeticized characters down into a sticky, unglamorous world where Humbert can't even figure out how the condom works. This is clearly Pera's mission--to vandalize the literary institution that is Lolita, and in this she has succeeded. Her novel is like cultural graffiti that won't wash off the walls for a while, for at least a month or two. --Emily White [via]
More editions of Lo's Diary:
- Lo's Diary: ISBN 0964374021 (0-9643740-2-1)
  Softcover, FoxRock, Incorporated
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov

ISBN 0679723161 (0-679-72316-1)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
Despite its lascivious reputation, the pleasures of Lolita are as much intellectual as erogenous. It is a love story with the power to raise both chuckles and eyebrows. Humbert Humbert is a European intellectual adrift in America, haunted by memories of a lost adolescent love. When he meets his ideal nymphet in the shape of 12-year-old Dolores Haze, he constructs an elaborate plot to seduce her, but first he must get rid of her mother. In spite of his diabolical wit, reality proves to be more slippery than Humbert's feverish fantasies, and Lolita refuses to conform to his image of the perfect lover.
Playfully perverse in form as well as content, riddled with puns and literary allusions, Nabokov's 1955 novel is a hymn to the Russian-born author's delight in his adopted language. Indeed, readers who want to probe all of its allusive nooks and crannies will need to consult the annotated edition. Lolita is undoubtedly, brazenly erotic, but the eroticism springs less from the "frail honey-hued shoulders ... the silky supple bare back" of little Lo than it does from the wantonly gorgeous prose that Humbert uses to recount his forbidden passion:
She was musical and apple-sweet ... Lola the bobby-soxer, devouring her immemorial fruit, singing through its juice ... and every movement she made, every shuffle and ripple, helped me to conceal and to improve the secret system of tactile correspondence between beast and beauty--between my gagged, bursting beast and the beauty of her dimpled body in its innocent cotton frock.
Much has been made of Lolita as metaphor, perhaps because the love affair at its heart is so troubling. Humbert represents the formal, educated Old World of Europe, while Lolita is America: ripening, beautiful, but not too bright and a little vulgar. Nabokov delights in exploring the intercourse between these cultures, and the passages where Humbert describes the suburbs and strip malls and motels of postwar America are filled with both attraction and repulsion, "those restaurants where the holy spirit of Huncan Dines had descended upon the cute paper napkins and cottage-cheese-crested salads." Yet however tempting the novel's symbolism may be, its chief delight--and power--lies in the character of Humbert Humbert. He, at least as he tells it, is no seedy skulker, no twisted destroyer of innocence. Instead, Nabokov's celebrated mouthpiece is erudite and witty, even at his most depraved. Humbert can't help it--linguistic jouissance is as important to him as the satisfaction of his arrested libido. --Simon Leake [via]
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Lolita
by Harold Bloom

ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
Hardcover, Facts on File

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- Lolita: ISBN 0791009610 (0-7910-0961-0)
  Hardcover, Facts on File
Lolita
by Richard Corliss

ISBN 0851703682 (0-85170-368-2)
Softcover, British Film Inst

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- Lolita: ISBN 0851703682 (0-85170-368-2)
  Softcover, British Film Inst
Love in a Dead Language
by Lee Siegel

ISBN 0226756998 (0-226-75699-8)
Softcover, Univ of Chicago Pr

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Book summary:
Philip Roth has done it. So have Updike and Nabokov. Now Lee Siegel joins the ranks of novelists who write novels that pretend not to be novels at all. Love in a Dead Language, for example, purports to be the work of one Professor Leopold Roth, and comprises both a translation of, and commentary on, the Kama Sutra, as well as the professor's more personal annotations concerning his amorous yearnings for one of his students. Siegel himself appears in a foreword, protesting vigorously that "I would never permit my name to be associated with a book such as this." This squeamishness is understandable when it becomes clear the entire purpose for this translation is to aid Roth in seducing young Lalita Gupta while leading a study group in India. Seduction, betrayal, and eventually death all follow on one another's heels; when Roth rather abruptly dies midway through the "translation," Siegel refuses to finish it and the task is left to a graduate student, Anang Saighal. So now we have yet another author who is not Siegel adding another layer of commentary to both Roth's professional work and his private journals--contradicting, criticizing, footnoting, while at the same time revealing details about his own unhappy life.
Though there's plenty of story in Love in a Dead Language--romance, transformation, and even a murder mystery--a magical delight in language in all its myriad forms is at its heart. From the academese of professional papers to the more intimate epistolary communications between friends, colleagues, husbands, and wives (letters between an earlier translator of the Kama Sutra, Richard Burton, and his wife--who later burned the translation--are included), Siegel--or is it Roth? or perhaps Saighal?--covers the gamut. Readers who love complicated plots, soaring language, etymological puzzles, and academic tomfoolery will have a ball with this playful instance of literary smoke and mirrors. --Margaret Prior [via]
More editions of Love in a Dead Language:
- Love in a Dead Language: ISBN 0226756971 (0-226-75697-1)
  Hardcover, Univ of Chicago Pr
- Love in a Dead Language: ISBN 0226756998 (0-226-75699-8)
  Softcover, Univ of Chicago Pr
Mekhti
by Amy Bassan

ISBN 0930773713 (0-930773-71-3)
Hardcover, Black Heron Pr

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- Mekhti: ISBN 0930773713 (0-930773-71-3)
  Hardcover, Black Heron Pr
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Naomi
by Jun Ichiro Tanizaki, Anthony H. Chambers

ISBN 0375724745 (0-375-72474-5)
Softcover, Vintage Books

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Book summary:
Naomi-a "moga," or modern girl-defies Japanese tradition in dress, etiquette, and morality in this satirical tale of obsessive love set in 1920s Tokyo. As narrated by her husband, Joji, the story of Naomi reveals the enthusiasm and confusion with which most urban Japanese contended with the irresistible attractions of Western culture. [via]
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Naomi
by Anthony H. Chambers, Jun Ichiro Tanizaki

ISBN 0394536630 (0-394-53663-0)
Hardcover, Random House Inc

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- Naomi: ISBN 0394536630 (0-394-53663-0)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
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Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
by Azar Nafisi

ISBN 081297106X (0-8129-7106-X)
Softcover, Random House Inc

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Book summary:
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen [via]
More editions of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books:
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books: ISBN 0375504907 (0-375-50490-7)
  Hardcover, Random House Inc
- Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books: ISBN 081297106X (0-8129-7106-X)
  Softcover, Random House Inc
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Turning Angel
by Greg Iles

ISBN 141653556X (1-4165-3556-X)
Softcover, Simon & Schuster

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Book summary:
"Greg Iles's storytelling blazes like a supernova". Includes an excerpt from "True Evil" [via]
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Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places
by Peter Nabokov

ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated

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Book summary:
From the author of Native American Testimony comes a revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian

For thousands of years Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious locations in their homelands. In Where the Lightning Strikes, Peter Nabokov offers sixteen "biographies of place" that dramatize the rich diversity of Indian cultures and their religious systems across North America. From the mountains of Maine to Tennessees Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona to the high country of northwestern California, each chapter explores a host of relationships between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths, legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.
Based on years of research and personal experience, Where the Lightning Strikes reveals a range of holy lands containing beneficial as well as malevolent forces and reminds us of the stubborn persistence of Indian beliefs in the sacredness of the American earth. [via]
More editions of Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places:
- Where the Lightning Strikes: The Lives of American Indian Sacred Places: ISBN 0670034320 (0-670-03432-0)
  Hardcover, Penguin Group (USA) Incorporated