Is it pornography? That’s the question that seems always to attend Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the “classic” selection for the inaugural Plum-Atlantic reading list. The Atlantic, for its part, has consistently answered that question with a resounding “No.” When Lolita arrived on American shores in the 1950s, Charles Rolo reviewed it for the magazine, writing “There is not a single obscene term in Lolita, and aficionados of erotica are likely to find it a dud. Lolita blazes, however, with a perversity of a most original kind. For Mr. Nabokov has distilled from his shocking material hundred-proof intellectual farce … It is one of the funniest serious novels I have ever read; and the vision of its abominable hero, who never deludes or excuses himself, brings into grotesque relief the cant, the vulgarity, and the hypocritical conventions that pervade the human comedy.” Other writers who revisited the book in The Atlantic’s pages in later years were no less adulatory. In 1992 Martin Amis wrote of the book, “I have come to see it, with increasing awe, as exactly the kind of novel that its predecessors are pointing toward,” and “Lolita is perhaps the funniest novel in the language.” More recently Christopher Hitchens, writing about the book on the 50th anniversary of its publication, situated it alongside Joyce’s Ulysses and announced that even after multiple re-readings, the novel keeps its “promise of genius.” A masterpiece of literary craftsmanship, Lolita is an excellent jumping-off point for a discussion of the relationship between style and morality, aesthetics and ethics.