"Lo-lee-ta," intones Humbert Humbert on the opening page of Vladimir Nabokov's masterpiece before proceeding with his enchanting faux-confession. By the end of the novel, though, Humbert confesses "it struck me ... that I did not know a thing about my darling's mind." What then, - or rather, who? - was behind those notorious syllables that so captivated Humbert? An audacious first novel sure to cause much fuss among Nabokov's admirers and critics alike, Pia Pera has given Lolita a voice. We start in the office of John Ray, the fictional author and professional boor who introduced Lolita. Now employed by the Olympia Press in Paris, he is shocked when a certain young mother, Dolores Schlegel (formerly "Maze"), walks in his door, offers up her diary, and after a few hasty words, walks back out. Once again it falls to Mr. Ray to assemble the manuscript–Lo's Diary–which we have here.

A brilliant and subversive running commentary on a canonic novel, Lo's Diary is also an astonishingly meticulous representation of the interior world of a tortured teenager. By turns bratty and broadly comic, vulgar and vulnerable, Pia Pera's Lolita is a flesh and blood heroine created to fill the void left by the enigmatic but fundamentally passive figure onto which Humbert projected his fantasies.