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Pale Fire

Name: Pale Fire
Price: 19.00 USD
Availability: InStock
Author: Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN: 9780679723424

Paperback $19.00

Published on Apr 23, 1989 | 320 Pages

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$19.00

Published on Apr 23, 1989 | 320 Pages

Buy from Other Retailers:

A darkly comic novel of suspense, literary idolatry and one-upmanship, and political intrigue from one of the leading writers of the twentieth century, the acclaimed author of Lolita.

“Half-poem, half-prose…a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. One of the great works of art of this century.” —Mary McCarthy, New York Times bestselling author of The Group

An ingeniously constructed parody of detective fiction and learned commentary, Pale Fire offers a cornucopia of deceptive pleasures, at the center of which is a 999-line poem written by the literary genius John Shade just before his death. Surrounding the poem is a foreword and commentary by the demented scholar Charles Kinbote, who interweaves adoring literary analysis with the fantastical tale of an assassin from the land of Zembla in pursuit of a deposed king. Brilliantly constructed and wildly inventive, Vladimir Nabokov’s witty novel achieves that rarest of things in literature—perfect tragicomic balance.

“This centaur-work, half poem, half prose…is a creation of perfect beauty, symmetry, strangeness, originality and moral truth. Pretending to be a curio, it cannot disguise the fact that it is one of the great works of art of this century.” —Mary McCarthy, The New Republic

“As a literary tour de force it surpasses anything else Mr. Nabokov has done.” —Atlantic Monthly

“Scintillating, brilliantly inventive…[Pale Fire] has almost as many layers of meaning as an artichoke has petals.” —Commonwealth

“Of all [Nabokov’s] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest, the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God’s earth.” —New York Herald Tribune

“A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work…done with dazzling skill.” —Time

“Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically.” —John Updike

Author

Vladimir Nabokov

Vladimir Nabokov studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, writing prolifically in Russian under the pseudonym Sirin. In 1940, he left France for America, where he wrote some of his greatest works—Bend Sinister (1947), Lolita (1955), Pnin (1957), and Pale Fire (1962)—and translated his earlier Russian novels into English. He taught at Wellesley, Harvard, and Cornell. He died in Montreux, Switzerland, in 1977.

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Pale Fire

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Part of Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series