The Crime Lady: THE REAL LOLITA, Now In Paperback
Dear TCL Readers,
Today is paperback publication day! The Real Lolita is now available in the US in paperback, with a new subtitle — A Lost Girl, An Unthinkable Crime, and a Scandalous Masterpiece — and a new afterword. What a post-publication year it’s been, and I cannot thank everyone enough who read, bought, listened to, and borrowed my book. I’m also happy that a more affordable print edition is available so that it may reach an even broader swath of readers. I’m excited for the book to have a long paperback publication life, to be taught in universities and colleges — that’s already begun to happen — and to continue conversations about art, appropriation, and the responsibility authors have to their source material. Not to mention, to center Sally Horner, her brief life and her tragic death, in these ongoing discussions.
To learn a little bit more about what’s in the afterword, here’s what Ron Charles wrote up for the Washington Post’s newsletter “Book Club”:
And yes, that is indeed a plug for the Center for Fiction panel I’m moderating. Details are here. For the full list of events for the paperback, go here. I’ll be doing readings and events in Queens, Brooklyn, the Washington, DC area, Chicago, and Dallas, which is hosting the 50th anniversary Bouchercon, as well as the Anthony Awards — and The Real Lolita is nominated in the Best Nonfiction/Critical category. (I’ll also be on a couple panels, one awards-related and one on a topic I’m well-versed in, but specific details have to wait till the whole panel grid is up.)
Paperback publications typically don’t have the same publicity blitz as would the hardcover edition (which is precisely how it should be) but The Real Lolita still garnered some extra attention of late:
Attica Locke, as part of her “By the Book” Q&A for the New York Times Book Review, had this to say about me and the book: “Sarah Weinman…is the future of true crime reporting. The Real Lolita is a page-turning look at a salacious kidnapping — which inspired Vladimir Nabokov, whether or not he wished to admit it — but it is also a sociological study of girlhood and the ways in which our views about rules and meanings of girlhood both have and haven’t changed since the publication of Nabokov’s book” (Attica’s latest novel, Heaven, My Home, is wonderful, and she’ll be in conversation with Megan Abbott at Books Are Magic on September 17.)
The Seattle Times’s Moira Macdonald included The Real Lolita in her paperback roundup column
NJ Spotlight chose it as a Summer Reading pick
Book Riot mentioned it in a recent true crime reading roundup
Jason Goodwin, one of the judges for the Historical Writers Association’s Crown Awards (for which I’m longlisted), said The Real Lolita was “brilliant sleuthing” in Country Life
Now, almost all of this coverage is for the US edition, published by Ecco. Canadian and UK readers will have to wait a little longer: Vintage Canada will publish its edition on January 28, 2020, while Weidenfeld & Nicolson brings out the paperback edition on February 6. Here’s a sneak preview of the covers for each of these new editions, which have also been changed from the hardcovers:
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READ/WATCH/LISTEN
The Washington Post has been extra-kind of late, as they also published my most recent piece, a short op-ed on season two of the excellent Netflix series Mindhunter, why I’ve become increasingly sensitized to true crime, and why that’s ultimately a good thing. As I write: “I don’t want to reduce trauma to bite-size beats before a mattress commercial. I know violent death is messy, and real life can never neatly fit into a tight narrative structure. But I also see how shaping that pain for the edification of a larger audience can be helpful, even cathartic.”
Most of my book reading is either for forthcoming articles, book research-related — I spent the first week of September in the happiest state, working through the archives of William F. Buckley, Jr. at Sterling Memorial Library — or book research-adjacent, in that I am gravitating more towards classic works. I half-jokingly dubbed this past season the “Summer of Wharton” because once I started reading Edith Wharton’s novels and stories, I found I could not stop. They are all masterpieces to varying degrees, but I’m especially admiring of the ending of Ethan Frome and the sweep of The Custom of the Country, which seems to be undergoing an extra revival now (see Jia Tolentino’s essay on the book, which she considers one of her all-time favorites.)
I was also blown away by Fierce Attachments by Vivian Gornick, and while I have no idea if it is, in fact, the best memoir published in the past 50 years, it’s certainly among the best I’ve ever read. I tore through several of her other books while on a writing mini-retreat in Maine last month, and can recommend The Situation and the Story in particular for how to approach memoir and essay writing — or even to heighten creative nonfiction pursuits in general.
Still, I am reading some 2020 ARCs. I really enjoyed The Only Child by Min-Ae Sao, which is being pitched as “The Bad Seed meets Silence of the Lambs” but which I prefer to think of as “Mindhunter as written by Natsuo Kirino.” And William Boyle has a new crime novel out next month, City of Margins, that further cements him among the best noir novelists we have now, and among the best chroniclers of a Brooklyn still stubbornly resistant to gentrification.
In podcasts, I’m already hooked on the new season of CBC’s Uncover, on the unsolved murder of 15-year-old Sharmini Anandavel in 1999. I remember her disappearance so vividly, as a Canadian girl not too many years older, and wondered if her killer would ever be apprehended. 2 episodes in and already there are so many more answers and new questions on this case.
And now, it’s time to get back to work on the new book. More soon, including a new dispatch for paying subscribers, and if you want to get on that, here’s how:
Until then, I remain,
The Crime Lady