Celebrating Literary Freedom!

September 22nd to 28th is Banned Books Week! To mark the occasion, we share this fascinating clip from the CBC Archives of V. Nabokov discussing that confoundingly beautiful and troublesome work, Lolita. 

"I don't wish to touch hearts, and I don't even want to affect minds very much. What I want to produce is, really, that little sob in the spine of the artist reader....I have invented an America, my America, just as fantastic as any inventor's America...How helpless and how lovely she is."

(A major bonus here is the presence of Lionel Trilling, unparalleled literary mind, who himself dared to write, in a 1958 review of the novel: "Lolita is about love. Perhaps I shall be better understood if I put the statement in this form: Lolita is not about sex, but about love. Almost every page sets forth some explicit erotic emotion or some overt erotic action and still it is not about sex. It is about love." Find Trilling's brilliant interpretation in full, entitled "The Last Lover," in The Moral Obligation to Be Intelligent, Northwestern University Press, 2008.)