Sarah Weinman, "The Real Lolita" (w/ Laura Lippman)

Sarah Weinman discusses her book, "The Real Lolita", at Politics and Prose on 9/12/18.

Nabokov’s Lolita, the story of a middle-aged man obsessed with a twelve-year-old girl, has fascinated and troubled readers since its publication in 1955. As Weinman shows in her revelatory history of a 1948 kidnapping case, the novel owed as much to actual events as it did to Nabokov’s imagination. The real-life “Lolita” was Sally Horner, eleven-years-old when she was caught stealing by a fifty-year-old man who told her he was an FBI agent. He abducted her and drove her from New Jersey across the country. After twenty-one months, Sally escaped; her kidnapper was arrested in 1950. Acting as both a true-crime reporter and literary sleuth, Weinman tells Horner’s story in detail and shows what Nabokov knew of the case when he wrote his novel and how he disguised that knowledge. Weinman is in conversation with Laura Lippman, author most recently of Sunburn.

Sarah Weinman is the editor of Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s & 50s (Library of America) and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (Penguin). She covers book publishing for Publishers Marketplace, and has written for the New York Times, the New Republic, the Guardian, and Buzzfeed, among other outlets. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.

Founded by Carla Cohen and Barbara Meade in 1984, Politics and Prose Bookstore is Washington, D.C.'s premier independent bookstore and cultural hub, a gathering place for people interested in reading and discussing books. Politics and Prose offers superior service, unusual book choices, and a haven for book lovers in the store and online. Visit them on the web at

Produced by Tom Warren