The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman
The Real Lolita, Sarah Weinman
6 Rating(s)
List: $20.99 | Sale: $14.70
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The Real Lolita
The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World

Author: Sarah Weinman

Narrator: Cassandra Campbell

Unabridged: 7 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: HarperAudio

Published: 09/11/2018


Synopsis

“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 MoonVladimir 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.

About Sarah Weinman

Sarah Weinman is the author of Scoundrel and The Real Lolita and, most recently, is the editor of Evidence of Things Seen: True Crime in an Era of Reckoning. She was a 2020 National Magazine Award finalist for reporting and a Calderwood Journalism Fellow at MacDowell, and her work has appeared in Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, Esquire, and New York magazine. Weinman is the Crime & Mystery columnist for the New York Times Book Review and lives in New York City.


Reviews

Goodreads review by emma on November 09, 2020

To be honest, this feels like someone took, like, an English 201 essay and made it 300 pages long. It's not true crime. It's not literary analysis. It's this weird kind of ill-marketed in-between thing and it's a huge bummer. All the information is interesting, and Sally Horner really deserves to have......more

Goodreads review by Bill on April 28, 2024

Sarah Weinman’s The Real Lolita is perhaps unique in the annals of true crime because of the double mystery it explores. The first mystery: to discover the real girl behind a half-forgotten news story, the kidnapping in 1948 of eleven-year-old Sally Horner by fifty-year-old pedophile Frank La Salle......more

Goodreads review by exorcismemily on September 05, 2018

"Knowing about Sally Horner does not diminish Lolita's brilliance, or Nabokov's audacious inventiveness, but it does augment the horror he also captured in the novel." I had not heard of Sally Horner's case prior to coming across The Real Lolita, so I was really looking forward to this book. I was c......more