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 should.
Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterwork is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.
ISBN: | 9780141185262 |
Publication date: | 31st August 2000 |
Author: | Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, Mary McCarthy |
Publisher: | Penguin Classics an imprint of Penguin Books Ltd |
Format: | Paperback |
Pagination: | 248 pages |
Series: | Penguin Classics |
Genres: |
Modern and Contemporary Fiction Classic fiction: general and literary |