Pale Fire: A Poem in Four Cantos by John Shade
Gingko Press's edition of Pale Fire is hands-down the most beautiful book of the year. (...) Pale Fire is the product of three years passion, originally conceived by Jean Holabird, an artist who suggested the idea to longtime friend, Gingko's publisher, Mo Cohen. Cohen became the spearhead for the project, seeking out Nabokov expert Bryan Boyd, working with project coordinator Anika Heusermann and even traveling to Montreux to spend a day with Dmitri Nabokov, discussing the project and watching endurance car racing on TV. I make mention of passion because you can feel three years work when you hold this book. Its contents, hidden within a black box that unfolds this way and that much in the way Nabokov's book does, feel substantial; they feel important. When you hold the book, you remember that books can actually just be beautiful things. --Publishers Weekly...The Gingko Press Pale Fire is a fetishist's dream, an extravagant plaything to be unpacked and fondled with glee. (Nabokov: One should notice and fondle details.) In another, it is a serious statement about how seriously we ought to take Nabokov's longest and most ambitious piece of verse. The new edition also comes with a svelte booklet containing two essays, by the Nabokov biographer Brian Boyd and the distinguished poet R. S. Gwynn, both of which argue passionately for the aesthetic splendor and autonomy of Pale Fire the poem. --The New YorkerThis jewelbox of intellectual, polemical bookmaking is a defiant shot across the bow of those dull-witted critics who, over the decades, have denigrated the poem as a pastiche, a parody even (the truly tin-eared) a prank, because they are unable to (literally) think outside the box and read the poem as an unconventionally presented integral work of art, a meditation on fate, death, and art that in my view is the pre-eminent work of verse in American literature in the past century. This does not mean it doesn't work as well as the central element within the novel, but (to use the Shakespearean metaphor in the title) the poem is the sun, the footnoted text its reflected lunar luminosity. At last it emerges from eclipse. --Slate