Dispute over Lolita spin-off

New York - The Vladimir Nabokov estate is taking legal action to block the publication in the United States of Lo's Diary, a …

New York - The Vladimir Nabokov estate is taking legal action to block the publication in the United States of Lo's Diary, a retelling of the celebrated novel Lolita from the girl's perspective.

It denounces the work, first published in Italy in 1995, as "inferior and amateurish merchandise". Lo's Diary, a first novel by Pia Pera (42), an Italian short story writer, is due to be published next July in the United States by Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

Ms Pera said through her publisher: "Lolita belongs not just to literature, but to everyday language and contemporary mythology." She had engaged, she said, in "a literary tennis match that, it seems to me, has a long, well-established tradition behind it".