The questions, discussion topics, author biography, and excerpt that follow are designed to enhance your group’s reading of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. We hope they will provide you with ways of looking at-and talking about-a novel that has become a permanent part of the American literary canon, and indeed of the American language, without losing its capacity to dazzle, baffle, and at times shock the unwary reader.

The shocks that Lolita delivers are not solely moral ones. Humbert Humbert kidnaps and seduces (if not rapes) his fourteen-year-old stepdaughter, Dolores Haze; estranges his victim from her family and friends and robs her of her childhood; plots one murder and successfully carries out another. The morality of these events is never in doubt. What is in doubt is how much of Humbert’s version of these events–and how much of Humbert himself–we can believe. For just as Nabokov’s preeningly perverse narrator wraps a straitjacket of deception around Charlotte and Dolores Haze only to find himself duped in turn, so readers of Lolita discover that nothing in this book is quite what it at first seems to be…. more