num_pages: 315
description: 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.
language: English
title: Pale Fire
titlecomplete: Pale Fire
characters: Jack Grey, Charles Kinbote, Gradus, Judge Goldsworth, John Shade, Botkin, Sybil (Nabokov)
genres: Fiction, American, Poetry, Literature, Classics, Novels, Russian Literature, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Russia
ratings_count: 49153
places: Cedarn, Utana, New Wye, Appalachia, Zembla
awards: awardedAt: -220896000000
name: National Book Award Finalist
category: Fiction
publisher: Quality Paperback Book Club