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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. This title is part of a major new beautiful hardback series of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, author of "Lolita" and "Pale Fire", in Penguin Classics.

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He did us all an honour by electing to use, and transform, our language -- Anthony Burgess