Available Formats
Paperback
Published: 14th June 2001
Hardback
Published: 24th April 1992
Paperback
Published: 20th August 2024
Pale Fire
By (Author) Vladimir Nabokov
Penguin Books Ltd
Penguin Classics
14th June 2001
31st August 2000
United Kingdom
General
Fiction
Classic fiction: general and literary
813.54
Paperback
256
Width 130mm, Height 198mm, Spine 15mm
194g
A novel constructed around the last great poem of a fictional American poet, John Shade, and an account of his death. The poem appears in full and the narrative develops through the lengthy, and increasingly eccentric, notes by his posthumous editor.
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
Vladimir Nabokov (1899-1977) was born in St Petersburg. He wrote his first literary works in Russian, but rose to international prominence as a masterly prose stylist for the novels he composed in English, most famously, Lolita. Between 1923 and 1940 he published novels, short stories, plays, poems and translations in the Russian language and established himself as one of the most outstanding Russian emigre writers.