Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Alabama

The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel That Scandalized the World

“The Real Lolita is a tour de force of literary detective work. Not only does it shed new light on the terrifying true saga that influenced Nabokov’s masterpiece, it restores the forgotten victim to our consciousness.” —David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita is one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time. And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real-life case: the 1948 abduction of eleven-year-old Sally Horner. Weaving together suspenseful crime narrative, cultural and social history, and literary investigation, The Real Lolita tells Sally Horner’s full story for the very first time. Drawing upon extensive investigations, legal documents, public records, and interviews with remaining relatives, Sarah Weinman uncovers how much Nabokov knew of the Sally Horner case and the efforts he took to disguise that knowledge during the process of writing and publishing Lolita. Sally Horner’s story echoes the stories of countless girls and women who never had the chance to speak for themselves. By diving deeper in the publication history of Lolita and restoring Sally to her rightful place in the lore of the novel’s creation, The Real Lolita casts a new light on the dark inspiration for a modern classic.

The Real Lolita

c42ad9de-2025-472c-bf8b-38e4bb15bb0a

Sarah Weinman

District of Columbia

Anne Rampling

Anne Rice

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

Pennsylvania

Obsessed with the mystery surrounding Belinda, his precocious sixteen-year-old lover, Jeremy Walker, a middle-aged illustrator of children's books, is swept into Belinda's world of Hollywood money, lust, and dark family secrets. Reprint.

Belinda

bd75ae87-8f0f-490e-8cec-b9b886f9302a-1

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Connecticut

A Lost Girl, an Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece

California

#hardcover #nonfiction #truecrime #lolita #kidnapping #sarahorner #weinman 

New York

Azar Nafisi

A Life in Books

A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people’s lives, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her million-copy bestseller, Reading Lolita in Tehran, which told the story of how, against the backdrop of morality squads and executions, she taught The Great Gatsby and other classics to her eager students in Iran. In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling, and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America.

Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, she energetically responds to those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels—The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt, and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, among others—she invites us to join her as citizens of her “Republic of Imagination,” a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

The Republic of Imagination

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New Jersey

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, Nabokov's first novel in English, was completed in Paris in 1938, first published by New Directions in 1941, reissued in 1959 to wide critical acclaim and now relaunched again, with an appreciative introduction by Pulitzer-Prize winning critic Michael Dirda.

This, the narrator tells us, is the real life of famous author Sebastian Knight, the inside story. After Knight's death, his half-brother sets out to penetrate the mystery of the famous English novelist's life, but he is impeded by the false, the distorted, the irrelevant. Yet the search proves to be a story quite as intriguing as any of Sebastian Knight's own books, as baffling, and, in the end, as uniquely rewarding. On one level, this literary detective story has pungent points to make about the role of the artist in a society basically hostile to the creative spirit. On another, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight probes the essential problem of the ambiguity of human identity: Just who was Sebastian Knight?

The Real Life of Sebastian Knight

1a4c9d87-c88b-464e-848f-d645a71797d6-1

Vladimir Nabokov

Texas

A novel that studies the moral disintegration of a man whose obsessive desire to possess his step-daughter destroys the lives of those around him

Lolita

5032ffee-cf2c-4671-b25c-c705f4c20c1f-1

Julia May Jonas

Wisconsin

A Novel

An NPR, Washington Post, Time, People, Vulture, Guardian, Vox, Kirkus Reviews, Newsweek, LitHub, and New York Public Library Best Book of the Year * "Delightful...cathartic, devious, and terrifically entertaining." --The New York Times * "Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny." --People (Book of the Week)

A provocative, razor-sharp, and timely debut novel about a beloved English professor facing a slew of accusations against her professor husband by former students--a situation that becomes more complicated when she herself develops an obsession of her own...

"When I was a child, I loved old men, and I could tell that they also loved me." And so we are introduced to our narrator who's "a work of art in herself" (The Washington Post): a popular English professor whose charismatic husband at the same small liberal arts college is under investigation for his inappropriate relationships with his former students. The couple have long had a mutual understanding when it comes to their extra-marital pursuits, but with these new allegations, life has become far less comfortable for them both. And when our narrator becomes increasingly infatuated with Vladimir--a celebrated, married young novelist who's just arrived on campus--their tinder box world comes dangerously close to exploding.

"Timely, whip-smart, and darkly funny" (People), Vladimir takes us into charged territory, where the boundaries of morality bump up against the impulses of the human heart. This edgy, uncommonly assured debut perfectly captures the personal and political minefield of our current moment, exposing the nuances and the grey area between power and desire.

Vladimir

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Paperback 50th anniversary edition. Never read so binding is completely perfect. A little foxing on edges of pages. Purchased at The Strand in NYC. 

Ohio

Massachusetts

A Memoir in Books

Reading Lolita in Tehran

(Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (The Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Véra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the émigré author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, Véra, and third for no one at all.

"Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spanning much of the century, the story of the Nabokovs' fifty-two-year marriage reads as vividly as a novel. Véra, both beautiful and brilliant, is its outsized heroine--a woman who loves as deeply and intelligently as did the great romantic heroines of Austen and Tolstoy. Stacy Schiff's Véra is a triumph of the biographical form.

Vera

28309148-3cd6-4e74-a320-04e80de164c9-1

Water damage to book boards but pages are not affected. Pages are clean and intact

Illinois

Speak, Memory

Smoke free home. Ships securely and with care! 

Revised and Updated

The textural discussion accompanying this novel examines the thematic and technical elements which make it a literary classic

The Annotated Lolita

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The Annotated Lolita 

Montana

#memoir #lolita #tehran #nafisi              NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • We all have dreams—things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi’s dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. 

For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading—Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita—their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran. 

Nafisi’s account flashes back to the early days of the revolution, when she first started teaching at the University of Tehran amid the swirl of protests and demonstrations. In those frenetic days, the students took control of the university, expelled faculty members and purged the curriculum. When a radical Islamist in Nafisi’s class questioned her decision to teach The Great Gatsby, which he saw as an immoral work that preached falsehoods of “the Great Satan,” she decided to let him put Gatsby on trial and stood as the sole witness for the defense. 

Azar Nafisi’s luminous tale offers a fascinating portrait of the Iran-Iraq war viewed from Tehran and gives us a rare glimpse, from the inside, of women’s lives in revolutionary Iran. It is a work of great passion and poetic beauty, written with a startlingly original voice. 
Source: Publisher

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