Places on the Moon

"Thoroughly inventive and enticingly salacious."
"Koppisch proves there is always more to the story!"

Koppisch's Places on the Moon is not only a commentary on the sexual mores of our time (think the MeToo movement) deftly communicated through a twisted love story. It is definitely that, but it is also an inspired celebration of the female lead in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita. However, Koppisch employs some sleight of hand with the controversial 1955 novel. In Places on the Moon, he takes the power differential at the heart of that story and flips it on its head.

Koppisch examines Nabokov's theme of illicit relationships between grown men and girls from the standpoint of Becket, a not-so-innocent sixteen-year-old, the main character in Places on the Moon. In this erotically charged, fast-paced farce, Koppisch has populated the largely unknown inner life of Nabokov's Dolores Haze using the power of his own imagination, giving us a glimpse of her motives and agency as she struggles to remake her relationship with the much older, sadistic Percy into one that is at least partially transactional.

Places on the Moon is a must-read for anyone who has ever been curious to know the other side of the story.