num_pages: 246
description: The American poet John Shade is dead. 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 be.Nabokov's darkly witty, richly inventive masterpiece is a suspenseful whodunit, a story of one-upmanship and dubious penmanship, and a glorious literary conundrum.Part of a major new series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of Lolita and Pale Fire, in Penguin Classics.
language: English
title: Pale Fire
titlecomplete: Pale Fire
characters: Charles Kinbote, John Shade, Judge Goldsworth, Botkin, Jack Grey, Sybil (Nabokov), Gradus
genres: 20th Century, American, Russia, Literary Fiction, Novels, Poetry, Literature, Russian Literature, Classics, Fiction
ratings_count: 49117
places: Cedarn, Utana, New Wye, Appalachia, Zembla
awards: awardedAt: -220896000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Penguin Books Ltd