Publisher, Random House Audiobooks (April 2005)

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Exhilarating, appallingly funny, and hauntingly sad, Lolita is Vladimir Nabokov's most famous and controversial novel, a twentieth century classic whose characters' names have become synonymous with the outrages and degradations of obsessive passion. For when the aging émigré Humbert Humbert falls in love with the precocious nymphet Dolores Haze, all the rules---of desire, decency, and literature---are broken. Lolita has the power to shock, challenge, and enrapture anyone who listens.

When it was published in 1955, Lolita immediately became a cause célèbre because of the freedom and sophistication with which it handled the unusual erotic predilections of its protagonist. But Vladimir Nabokov's wise, ironic, elegant masterpiece owes its stature as one of the twentieth century's novels of record not to the controversy its material aroused but to its author's use of that material to tell a love story almost shocking in its beauty and tenderness.

Awe and exhilaration–along with heartbreak and mordant wit–abound in this account of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsessive, devouring, and doomed passion for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America, but most of all, it is a meditation on love–love as outrage and hallucination, madness and transformation.