The Battle Cry of Maurice Giroudia

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Among Capote's best known works are Lolita which was written in English first and then translated by him into Russian later. His wife Vera actually you know he wrote it and he wanted to get rid of it. Graham Greene the author found it and wrote a review of it in the London Sunday Times. It had been turned down by a whole bunch of American publishing houses before that.

Usually books try to make you root for the protagonist. Even if he or she is flawed in some crucial way, most stories try to make you feel something for the person whose mind you're inhabiting. That is not the case in Vladmir Nabokov's Lolita.

This week we share with you an uncomfortable discussion about how it feels to read a book told from the perspective of an unrepentant pedophile—how do you feel about him? How do we feel about him? How does he feel about him? The difficult subject matter is just one of the things that has earned Lolita its place in the literary canon.

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