# Pale Fire

Canonical: https://www.bookquiver.com/vladimir-nabakov/pale-fire/9780141185262

![Pale Fire](https://quivercdn.com/covers/penguin-classics/vladimir-nabokov/pale-fire_978-01-4118-526-2.jpg?v=2026-04-23%2012%3A11%3A11)

- Book: [Pale Fire](https://www.bookquiver.com/vladimir-nabakov/pale-fire) ([Pale Fire.md](https://www.bookquiver.com/vladimir-nabakov/pale-fire.md))
- Authors: [Vladimir Nabakov](https://www.bookquiver.com/vladimir-nabakov)
- Publisher: penguin_classics
- ISBN: 978-01-4118-526-2
- Pages: 256
- Published: 2016-08-04
- Language: en_GB
- Binding: Softcover

## 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.