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 and intolerant, but also mad, bad and even dangerous. As his wildly eccentric annotations slide into the personal and the fantastical, Kinbote reveals perhaps more than he...
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