Pale Fire (Penguin Modern Classics): Vladimir Nabokov

by Vladimir Nabokov (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2000

  $11.95

  Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, with its wildly original narrative structure, is a postmodern masterpiece from the author of Lolita, skewering the politics of academia, the struggle for interpretation, and the infinite subjectivity of human experience, published in Penguin Modern Classics. The American poet John Shade is dead; murdered. His last poem, Pale Fire, is put into a book, together with a preface, a lengthy commentary and notes by Shade's editor, Charles Kinbote. Known on campus as the 'Great Beaver', Kinbote is haughty, inquisitive, intolerant, but is he also mad, bad - and even dangerous? As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he ought. Who is Charles Kinbote - could he be the exiled King Charles of Zembla, or the Russian madman, Professor Botkin? Or is he just another of John Shade's literary inventions? Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum. A Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem. (Mary McCarthy). Pale Fire must be one of the most brilliant and extraordinary novels ever written, let alone in the twentieth century. (William Boyd, author of Any Human Heart).

• New

  Paperback
  1989

  $17.04

• New

  Hardcover
  1992

  $17.78

  A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death. The poem appears in full and the narrative develops through the lengthy, and increasingly eccentric, notes by his posthumous editor.