-
Pale Fire
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor, Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 9 hrs and 19 mins
Failed to add items
Add to Cart failed.
Add to Wish List failed.
Remove from wishlist failed.
Adding to library failed
Follow podcast failed
Unfollow podcast failed
Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Buy for $17.95
No default payment method selected.
We are sorry. We are not allowed to sell this product with the selected payment method
Publisher's summary
A 999 line poem in heroic couplets, divided into 4 cantos, was composed - according to Nabokov's fiction - by John Francis Shade, an obsessively methodical man, during the last 20 days of his life.
Listeners also enjoyed...
-
Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
-
-
Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Lolita
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
-
-
An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
-
-
Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
-
-
Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
- By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
-
-
Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Lolita
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
-
-
An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
-
-
Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
-
-
Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
- By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Laughter in the Dark
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
-
-
Death is often the point of life's joke
- By Darwin8u on 05-19-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Transparent Things
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 3 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)
-
-
Moments of absolute and immortal genius
- By Darwin8u on 10-15-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
To the Lighthouse
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Nicole Kidman
- Length: 6 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
To the Lighthouse is Virginia Woolf’s arresting analysis of domestic family life, centering on the Ramseys and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland in the early 1900s. Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge, Eyes Wide Shut), who won an Oscar for her portrayal of Woolf in the film adaptation of Michael Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel
The Hours, brings the impressionistic prose of this classic to vibrant life.
-
-
A book that will challenge you to think.
- By Kelly on 04-23-17
By: Virginia Woolf
-
Gravity's Rainbow
- By: Thomas Pynchon, Frank Miller - cover design
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 37 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Winner of the 1973 National Book Award, Gravity's Rainbow is a postmodern epic, a work as exhaustively significant to the second half of the 20th century as Joyce's Ulysses was to the first. Its sprawling, encyclopedic narrative and penetrating analysis of the impact of technology on society make it an intellectual tour de force.
-
-
"Time to touch the person next to you"
- By Jefferson on 07-04-16
By: Thomas Pynchon, and others
-
Collected Fictions
- By: Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley - translator
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 5 hrs and 14 mins
- Abridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From his 1935 debut with "The Universal History of Iniquity", through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, these enigmatic, elaborate, imaginative inventions display Borges' talent for turning fiction on its head by playing with form and genre and toying with language.
-
-
Good but incomplete
- By Aaron on 12-17-18
By: Jorge Luis Borges, and others
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Enchanter
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
-
-
Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
- By Darwin8u on 10-14-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
King, Queen, Knave
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.
-
-
A non-Euclidean German love triangle.
- By Darwin8u on 04-01-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
As I Lay Dying
- By: William Faulkner
- Narrated by: Marc Cashman, Robertson Dean, Lina Patel, and others
- Length: 6 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of William Faulkner’s finest novels, As I Lay Dying, originally published in 1930, remains a captivating and stylistically innovative work. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren’s family sets out to fulfill her last wish: to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life.
-
-
Faulkner's As I Lay Dying review
- By Kristina on 11-12-08
By: William Faulkner
-
The Recognitions
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 47 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate "originals" - pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch - cannot even recognize.
-
-
Breathtaking, Dizzying, Stimulating, Funny
- By andrew on 11-17-10
By: William Gaddis
-
Steppenwolf
- By: Hermann Hesse
- Narrated by: Peter Weller
- Length: 7 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine.
-
-
Save this Hesse novel for your midlife crisis.
- By Darwin8u on 03-02-14
By: Hermann Hesse
-
Parade's End
- By: Ford Madox Ford
- Narrated by: Steven Crossley
- Length: 38 hrs and 12 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
First published as four separate novels ( Some Do Not…, No More Parades, A Man Could Stand Up, and The Last Post) between 1924 and 1928, Parade’s End explores the world of the English ruling class as it descends into the chaos of war. Christopher Tietjens is an officer from a wealthy family who finds himself torn between his unfaithful socialite wife, Sylvia, and his suffragette mistress, Valentine. A profound portrait of one man’s internal struggles during a time of brutal world conflict, Parade’s End bears out Graham Greene’s prediction that "there is no novelist of this century more likely to live than Ford Madox Ford."
-
-
A brilliant, challenging, and valuable work
- By leora on 09-11-12
By: Ford Madox Ford
Critic reviews
"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, The New Republic)
"Of all [Nabokov's] inventions, Pale Fire is the wildest, the funniest and the most earnest. It is like nothing on God's earth." (New York Herald Tribune)
"A monstrous, witty, intricately entertaining work . . . done with dazzling skill." (Time)
Featured Article: Essential Russian Authors to Know in Audio
Don’t be daunted by the towering reputations of Russia’s literary giants. Listening is the perfect way to appreciate the masters. Russia is a sprawling country with a rich and complex history, which is reflected in its literature. Whether you’re keen on brushing up on classic Russian literature or you want to find a new author to explore, we’ve rounded up 13 of the best Russian authors, classic and contemporary, whose work you should know.
Related to this topic
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Orlando
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Clare Higgins
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
-
-
Magical
- By Mayca on 05-31-05
By: Virginia Woolf
-
Time Pieces
- A Dublin Memoir
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.
-
-
‘loved it!
- By SandyK on 02-24-24
By: John Banville
-
Ghosts: Edith Wharton's Gothic Tales
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin, Jonathan Epstein, Corinna May, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
-
-
Ghastly Shadows of the Feminine Condition
- By Diane on 10-16-12
By: Edith Wharton
-
Spring Snow
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura.
-
-
An extraordinary work.......
- By Raj Saberwal on 05-29-14
By: Yukio Mishima
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Orlando
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Clare Higgins
- Length: 8 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Fantasy, love and an exuberant celebration of English life and literature, Orlando is a uniquely entertaining story. Originally conceived by Virginia Woolf as a playful tribute to the family of her friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West, Orlando's central character, a fictional embodiment of Sackville-West, changes sex from a man to a woman and lives throughout the centuries, whilst meeting historical figures of English literature.
-
-
Magical
- By Mayca on 05-31-05
By: Virginia Woolf
-
Time Pieces
- A Dublin Memoir
- By: John Banville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As much about the life of the city as it is about a life lived, sometimes, in the city, John Banville's "quasi-memoir" is as layered, emotionally rich, witty, and unexpected as any of his novels. Born and bred in a small town a train ride away from Dublin, Banville saw the city as a place of enchantment when he was a child, a birthday treat, the place where his beloved, eccentric aunt lived.
-
-
‘loved it!
- By SandyK on 02-24-24
By: John Banville
-
Ghosts: Edith Wharton's Gothic Tales
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Alison Larkin, Jonathan Epstein, Corinna May, and others
- Length: 4 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Beneath the brilliance that was behind The Age of Innocence and Ethan Frome was a dark side. A dark side which produced magnificent tales of the unseen influences in our lives, such as "Mr. Jones", "The Eyes", "Kerfol", "The Ladie's Maid's Bell", and "The Looking Glass".
-
-
Ghastly Shadows of the Feminine Condition
- By Diane on 10-16-12
By: Edith Wharton
-
Spring Snow
- By: Yukio Mishima
- Narrated by: Brian Nishii
- Length: 14 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Spring Snow is set in Tokyo in 1912, when the hermetic world of the ancient aristocracy is being breached for the first time by outsiders -- rich provincial families unburdened by tradition, whose money and vitality make them formidable contenders for social and political power. Among this rising new elite are the ambitious Matsugae, whose son has been raised in a family of the waning aristocracy, the elegant and attenuated Ayakura.
-
-
An extraordinary work.......
- By Raj Saberwal on 05-29-14
By: Yukio Mishima
-
A Tale of Love and Darkness
- By: Amos Oz
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 23 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the 40s and 50s in a small apartment crowded with books in 12 languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was 12 and a half years old, his mother committed suicide - a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz.
-
-
His life was interesting, but not his memoir
- By DR Harle on 01-27-19
By: Amos Oz
-
Manalive
- A Novel
- By: G. K. Chesterton
- Narrated by: Kevin O'Brien
- Length: 7 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This classic novel by the brilliant G. K. Chesterton tells the rollicking tale of Innocent Smith, a man who may be crazy - or possibly the most sane man of all. Arriving at a dreary London boarding house accompanied by a windstorm, Smith is an exuberant, eccentric, and sweet-natured man. Smith has a positive effect on the house - he creates his own court, brings a few couples together, and falls in love with a paid companion next door. All seems to be well with the world.
-
-
Mixed feelings on reading performance
- By TS on 09-23-18
By: G. K. Chesterton
-
The Loved One
- By: Evelyn Waugh
- Narrated by: Simon Prebble
- Length: 3 hrs and 24 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Following the death of a friend, the poet and pets' mortician Dennis Barlow finds himself entering the artificial Hollywood paradise of the Whispering Glades Memorial Park. Within its golden gates, death, American-style, is wrapped up and sold like a package holiday - and Dennis gets drawn into a bizarre love triangle with Aimée Thanatogenos, a naïve Californian corpse beautician, and Mr. Joyboy, a master of the embalmer's art.
-
-
Satire? Or just mean spirited?
- By 🔥 Phx17 🔥 on 02-08-23
By: Evelyn Waugh
-
Mrs. Dalloway
- By: Virginia Woolf
- Narrated by: Juliet Stevenson
- Length: 7 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
It is a June day in London in 1923, and the lovely Clarissa Dalloway is having a party. Whom will she see? Her friend Peter, back from India, who has never really stopped loving her? What about Sally, with whom Clarissa had her life’s happiest moment? Meanwhile, the shell-shocked Septimus Smith is struggling with his life on the same London day.
-
-
One Tough Read Perfectly Delivered
- By Chris on 06-11-12
By: Virginia Woolf
-
The Leopard
- A Novel
- By: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Archibald Colquhuon - translator
- Narrated by: Paul Woodson
- Length: 9 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Set in the 1860s, The Leopard tells the spellbinding story of a decadent, dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approaching forces of democracy and revolution. The dramatic sweep and richness of observation, the seamless intertwining of public and private worlds, and the grasp of human frailty imbue The Leopard with its particular melancholy beauty and power, and place it among the greatest historical novels of our time.
-
-
Timeless
- By Robert Massarella on 12-05-23
By: Giuseppe di Lampedusa, and others
-
Palace of Tears
- By: Julian Leatherdale
- Narrated by: Ming-Zhu Hii
- Length: 15 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The dazzling story of family, passion, secrets and vengeance, woven through the hardships of both World Wars and revealing the intriguing history of the Palace, the opulent Blue Mountains hotel famed for its luxury and mysterious owner. A sweltering summer's day, January 1914: the charismatic and ruthless Adam Fox throws a lavish birthday party for his son and heir at his elegant clifftop hotel in the Blue Mountains. Everyone is invited except Angie, the girl from the cottage next door.
-
-
Distractingly bad acting by narrator!
- By Bunny on 01-30-16
-
Ethan Frome
- By: Edith Wharton
- Narrated by: Scott Brick
- Length: 3 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Ethan Frome, a poor, downtrodden New England farmer, is trapped in a loveless marriage to his invalid wife, Zeena.When Zeena's young cousin Mattie arrives to help care for her, Ethan is immediately taken by Mattie's warm, vivacious personality. They fall desperately in love as he realizes how much is missing from his life and marriage.
-
-
Slow is smooth and smooth is Fast until it isn't
- By Darwin8u on 05-29-13
By: Edith Wharton
-
Now, Voyager
- Femmes Fatales
- By: Olive Higgins Prouty
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 7 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Boston blueblood Charlotte Vale has led an unhappy, sheltered life. Lonely, dowdy, repressed, and pushing 40, Charlotte finds salvation at a sanitarium, where she undergoes an emotional and physical transformation. After her extreme makeover, the new Charlotte tests her mettle by embarking on a cruise and finds herself in a torrid love affair with a married man which ends at the conclusion of the voyage. But only then can the real journey begin, as Charlotte is forced to navigate a new life for herself.
-
-
The Inspiration for The Movie Classic
- By Susie on 12-17-12
-
The Magus
- By: John Fowles
- Narrated by: Nicholas Boulton
- Length: 26 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
John Fowles’s The Magus was a literary landmark of the 1960s. Nicholas Urfe goes to a Greek island to teach at a private school and becomes enmeshed in curious happenings at the home of a mysterious Greek recluse, Maurice Conchis. Are these events, involving attractive young English sisters, just psychological games, or an elaborate joke, or more? Reality shifts as the story unfolds. The Magus reflected the issues of the 1960s perfectly, and it continues to create tension and concern today.
-
-
One of the best novels that I really think I hate.
- By Darwin8u on 01-29-14
By: John Fowles
-
Middle C
- By: William H. Gass
- Narrated by: Jeremy Arthur
- Length: 16 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Gass’ new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life - futile, comic, anarchic - arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland....
-
-
All the world was a stage. But not for all the wor
- By Darwin8u on 06-07-14
By: William H. Gass
-
The Great God Pan
- Esoteric Classics: Occult Fiction
- By: Arthur Machen
- Narrated by: Shea Taylor
- Length: 2 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Machen's novella The Great God Pan is often cited as one of Lovecraft's most notable influences. In it, Dr. Raymond's ultimate goal is to devise a way to open the mind of man so that he may experience all the world has to offer. He calls this "seeing the great god Pan". After much study of the human mind, he devises an experiment that involves minor brain surgery. He performs this experiment on a young woman named Mary, but when she awakens she is terrified and mentally crippled.
-
-
classic horror
- By Shantee on 05-04-16
By: Arthur Machen
-
The Blind Assassin
- By: Margaret Atwood
- Narrated by: Margot Dionne
- Length: 18 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
For the past twenty-five years, Margaret Atwood has written works of striking originality and imagination. In The Blind Assassin, she stretches the limits of her accomplishments as never before, creating a novel that is entertaining and profoundly serious. The novel opens with these simple, resonant words: "Ten days after the war ended, my sister drove a car off the bridge." They are spoken by Iris, whose terse account of her sister Laura's death in 1945 is followed by an inquest report proclaiming the death accidental.
-
-
Good book, TERRIBLE audio!
- By Whitney on 04-27-09
By: Margaret Atwood
People who viewed this also viewed...
-
Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
-
-
Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
-
-
Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
- By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Laughter in the Dark
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
-
-
Death is often the point of life's joke
- By Darwin8u on 05-19-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
-
-
A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
One of the best-loved of Nabokov's novels, Pnin features his funniest and most heart-rending character. Professor Timofey Pnin is a haplessly disoriented Russian emigre precariously employed on an American college campus in the 1950s. Pnin struggles to maintain his dignity through a series of comic and sad misunderstandings, all the while falling victim both to subtle academic conspiracies and to the manipulations of a deliberately unreliable narrator.
-
-
Why not leave their private sorrows to people?
- By Darwin8u on 01-13-20
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Speak Memory
- An Autobiography Revisited
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 9 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.
-
-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
- By Darwin8u on 08-09-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 6 hrs and 10 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Like Kafka's The Castle, Invitation to a Beheading embodies a vision of a bizarre and irrational world. In an unnamed dream country, the young man Cincinnatus C. is condemned to death by beheading for "gnostical turpitude", an imaginary crime that defies definition.
-
-
Nabokov's Strange Violin Playing in the Void
- By Darwin8u on 10-28-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Ada, or Ardor
- A Family Chronicle
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 20 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Published two weeks after Vladimir Nabokov’s seventieth birthday, Ada, or Ardor is one of his greatest masterpieces, the glorious culmination of his career as a novelist. It tells a love story troubled by incest, but it is also at once a fairy tale, epic, philosophical treatise on the nature of time, parody of the history of the novel, and erotic catalogue. Ada, or Ardor is no less than the supreme work of an imagination at white heat. This is the first American edition to include the extensive and ingeniously sardonic appendix by the author, written under the anagrammatic pseudonym Vivian Darkbloom.
-
-
Incest, a game the Whole Family Can Play
- By Darwin8u on 08-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Laughter in the Dark
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 5 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Albinus, a respectable, middle-aged man and aspiring filmmaker, abandons his wife for a lover half his age: Margot, who wants to become a movie star. When Albinus introduces her to Rex, an American movie producer, disaster ensues. What emerges is an elegantly sardonic and irresistibly ironic novel of desire, deceit, and deception, a curious romance set in the film world of Berlin in the 1930s.
-
-
Death is often the point of life's joke
- By Darwin8u on 05-19-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
From Vladimir Nabokov, the writer who shocked and delighted the world with his novels Lolita, Pale Fire, and Ada, or Ardor, comes a magnificent collection of stories. Written between the 1920s and the 1950s, these 68 tales — 14 of which have been translated into English for the first time - display all the shades of Nabokov’s imagination.
-
-
A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Mary
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
In a Berlin rooming house filled with an assortment of serio-comic Russian émigrés, Lev Ganin, a vigorous young officer poised between his past and his future, relives his first love affair. His memories of Mary are suffused with the freshness of youth and the idyllic ambience of pre-revolutionary Russia. In stark contrast is the decidedly unappealing boarder living in the room next to Ganin’s, who, he discovers, is Mary’s husband....
-
-
There IS something about Mary!
- By Darwin8u on 12-22-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Enchanter
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Enchanter is the Ur-Lolita, the precursor to Nabokov’s classic novel. At once hilarious and chilling, it tells the story of an outwardly respectable man and his fatal obsession with certain pubescent girls, whose coltish grace and subconscious coquetry reveal, to his mind, a special bud on the verge of bloom.
-
-
Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
- By Darwin8u on 10-14-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Despair
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 7 hrs and 19 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - 30 years after its original publication - Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann, a man who undertakes the perfect crime: his own murder. One of the 20th century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899. He studied French and Russian literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, then lived in Berlin and Paris, where he launched a brilliant literary career. In 1940 he moved to the United States, and achieved renown as a novelist, poet, critic, and translator.
-
-
Russian emigre candy dandy murderers R my weakness
- By Darwin8u on 10-02-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Gift is the last of the novels Nabokov wrote in his native language and the crowning achievement of that period in his literary career. It is also his ode to Russian literature, evoking the works of Pushkin, Gogol, and others in the course of its narrative: the story of Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, an impoverished émigré poet living in Berlin, who dreams of the book he will someday write - a book very much like The Gift itself.
One of the twentieth century’s master prose stylists, Vladimir Nabokov was born in St. Petersburg in 1899.
-
-
A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Bend Sinister
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The first novel Nabokov wrote while living in America, and the most overtly political novel he ever wrote, Bend Sinister is a modern classic. While it is filled with veiled puns and characteristically delightful wordplay, it is, first and foremost, a haunting and compelling narrative about a civilized man caught in the tyranny of a police state. Professor Adam Krug, the country's foremost philosopher, offers the only hope of resistance to Paduk, dictator and leader of the Party of the Average Man.
-
-
A fantastic fairytale of fascism
- By Darwin8u on 12-12-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
King, Queen, Knave
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 9 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
This novel is the story of Dreyer, a wealthy and boisterous proprietor of a men’s clothing emporium. Ruddy, self-satisfied, and thoroughly masculine, he is perfectly repugnant to his exquisite but cold middle-class wife, Martha. Attracted to his money but repelled by his oblivious passion, she longs for their nephew instead, the thin, awkward, myopic Franz. Newly arrived in Berlin, Franz soon repays his uncle’s condescension in his aunt’s bed.
-
-
A non-Euclidean German love triangle.
- By Darwin8u on 04-01-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, the first novel Nabokov wrote in English, is a tantalizing literary mystery in which a writer’s half brother searches to unravel the enigma of the life of the famous author of Albinos in Black, The Back of the Moon, and Doubtful Asphodel. A characteristically cunning play on identity and deception, the novel concludes “ I am Sebastian, or Sebastian is I, or perhaps we both are someone whom neither of us knows.”
-
-
A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Lolita
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Jeremy Irons
- Length: 11 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Awe and exhilaration—along with heartbreak and mordant wit—abound in Lolita, which tells the story of the aging Humbert Humbert's obsession for the nymphet Dolores Haze. Lolita is also the story of a hypercivilized European colliding with the cheerful barbarism of postwar America.
-
-
An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Look at the Harlequins!
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 7 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
As intricate as a house of mirrors, Nabokov’s last novel is an ironic play on the Janus-like relationship between fiction and reality. It is the autobiography of the eminent Russian-American author Vadim Vadimovich N. (b. 1899), whose life bears an uncanny resemblance to that of Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov, though the two are not to be confused (?).
-
-
Peek, Memory!
- By Darwin8u on 09-11-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Transparent Things
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 3 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
" Transparent Things revolves around the four visits of the hero - sullen, gawky Hugh Person - to Switzerland.... As a young publisher, Hugh is sent to interview R., falls in love with Armande on the way, wrests her, after multiple humiliations, from a grinning Scandinavian and returns to NY with his bride.... Eight years later - following a murder, a period of madness and a brief imprisonment - Hugh makes a lone sentimental journey to wheedle out his past...." (Martin Amis)
-
-
Moments of absolute and immortal genius
- By Darwin8u on 10-15-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
The Luzhin Defense
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Nabokov’s third novel, The Luzhin Defense, is a chilling story of obsession and madness. As a young boy, Luzhin was unattractive, distracted, withdrawn, sullen — an enigma to his parents and an object of ridicule to his classmates. He takes up chess as a refuge from the anxiety of his everyday life. His talent is prodigious and he rises to the rank of grandmaster — but at a cost: in Luzhin’s obsessive mind, the game of chess gradually supplants reality.
-
-
Life and chess are such lonely battles
- By Darwin8u on 11-13-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
JR
- By: William Gaddis
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins
- Unabridged
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering it's own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.
-
-
Possibly superior as an audio book
- By Peregrine on 12-12-10
By: William Gaddis
What listeners say about Pale Fire
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
-
Overall
- Melissa
- 06-30-11
Enhanced by Reader
The reader does a great job showing the humor in this book. I like Nabokov and think his prose is intricately surprising, but I was not a huge fan of this book because of the 3rd section: the mock literary criticism of the canto.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
5 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Anonymous User
- 06-06-19
Deep (too deep?)
The book is very deep, possibly too deep. Nabokov seems to write in knots that require more than one read through to understand. I do not recommend this book for someone reading for leisure. If you’re looking to flex your literary guns, Pale Fire is a demanding read. If you’re looking for a story and a leisure read, I would avoid it. The book feels like the author flaunting his intellect and talent in a way that deliberately has been crafted to confuse the reader. I didn’t enjoy myself, like one would feel about completing a mountain climb they didn’t intend to undertake.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
2 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- David C.
- 06-24-21
Cherished colleague or relentless stalker?
This is the second Nabokov work I have read. The first was Lolita and this, Pale Fire, are on the Modern Library's Top 100 Best Novels of the 20th Century.
Like Lolita, Pale Fire is drenched in sex and self reference (Lolita makes a cameo as a hurricane) and hints at the obsessive nature of the author whose alter ego stands in as narrator. Published in 1962, the story takes place over a few months in the summer of 1959 and focuses on a Four Part Canto of 999 lines written by John Shade, an American poet of some note who is on the faculty of a small university in Appalachia. The narrator is a visiting scholar, Professor Charles Kinbote, from the fictional country of Zembla who, upon Shade's death, secures the original manuscript of the Canto, written out on a series of index cards, and the right to publish along with his commentary.
Though they've only known each other for a few months, Kinbote informs the reader of the deep intimate connection between the two scholars unaware that he reveals how barely tolerated he is by both the poet and his ever present wife who serves as gatekeeper.
To Kinbote, this long canto isn't just Shade's work but a collaboration between them as, through his commentary, he desperately tries to link words and comments to his own experience which he insists Shade has masqueraded with other seemingly unrelated words.
It is hard to discern where narcissism ends and psychosis begins but, it is obvious that Kinbote lives in a world of his making. While he tries desperately to hint of his true identity, it seemed to me that the fanciful and important person he wants you to see, may all be figments of his imagination.
Reading upon on Nabokov's backstory, the similarity to the demise of the poet and the death of Nabokov's own father suggests that he is still playing out alternatives to that drama which he was unable to influence by suggesting that his narrator, in a futile attempt of self sacrifice, did not change the outcome of a strong father figure character. Both Kinbote and Nabokov seem to so desperately want to be heroic characters they are unable to live up to.
Pale Fire is strange, sexual and off times very amusing. Perhaps in Kinbote, we might be able to see that univited guest we are all known to encounter and, sometimes, unwittingly become.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- AmazonCustomer
- 03-27-12
An amazing feat for such a unique novel
While I highly recommend this selection, I can only recommend it to those who have read the printed novel first. Nabokov's book consists of a long poem written by John Shade, and a rambling, often hilarious, "commentary" written by Charles Kinbote, self-proclaimed king-in-exile from his beloved country of Zembla. As the commentary refers to specific lines of the 999-line poem, I was curious as to how the producers of the audiobook would handle these two distinct components. I was delighted by the choice to employ two narrators, Robert Blumenfeld for Shade and Marc Vietor for Kinbote. Both are excellent, but Vietor's Kinbote is what makes this audiobook so special. His unidentifiable (slightly Russian) accent and self-assured cockiness bring the exiled king (or plain madman) spring to life. Fans of the book should not feel they are wasting a credit by buying a book they've already read. Listening to Pale Fire will bring a new level of appreciation to Nabokov's brilliant novel.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
58 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- W Perry Hall
- 09-20-17
Ingenious, Nefariously Fun Satire
Nefariously Fun Satire of Literary Criticism, Satyriasis and Bold Virilia
Nabokov was such a pure genius in performing brilliant magic with words of the English language, as well as in creating playful and at times side-splitting satire that lacerates the objects of its scorn. In Pale Fire, Nabokov targeted academia of literature and literary criticism and, to a degree, all males' preoccupation with sex .
Nabokov isn't my favorite author by a longshot, but given his masterpieces in Lolita and Pale Fire, I'm not going out on a limb when I say he is probably second on the list of maestros of English linguistics, right behind Shakespeare. I only include the below lengthy quotes because this is the rare occasion in which the use of the language is as important as what is said.
The novel is split into two parts: first is a 999-line poem autobiographical of a fictional John Shade, a professor of lit at a New England college; then comes the commentary--the large majority of the novel--written by a professor named Charles Kinbote in another department of the college but who lives next door to Shade and his wife.
In reading Prof. Kinbote's extensive exegesis on the poem, it becomes readily apparent that something is amiss with him, really amiss. He implies that he is the exiled king of a country called Zembla, specifically that he is *Charles II, Charles Xavier Vseslav, last King of Zembla, surnamed The Beloved.* As to his assumed name Kinbote, he derived it from the *king-bot, maggot of extinct fly that once bred in mammoths and is thought to have hastened their phylogenetic end.*
Soon you wonder exactly how delusional Kinbote is, given that he believes that Shade's poem brims with references to himself (imaginary as they may seem), transforming through his commentary every few lines of the poem into a frame around himself and his fantasy realm of Zembla.
The novel is also somewhat of a mystery that you must decipher as to who killed John Shade after Kinbote tells us that he is safekeeping the *Pale Fire* poem manuscript and all notecards containing the poem.
Later, the reader learns that "immediately upon John Shade’s demise, [the head of the department] circulated a mimeographed letter that began:
*Several members of the Department of English are painfully concerned over the fate of a manuscript poem, or parts of a manuscript poem, left by the late John Shade. The manuscript fell into the hands of a person who not only is unqualified for the job of editing it, belonging as he does to another department, but is known to have a deranged mind. One wonders whether some legal action, etc.*
Yet, long before this, clues abound of Kinbote's psychosis. For example,
*What would I not have given for the poet’s suffering another heart attack ... leading to my being called over to their house, all windows ablaze, in the middle of the night, in a great warm burst of sympathy, coffee, telephone calls, Zemblan herbal receipts (they work wonders!), and a resurrected Shade weeping in my arms ('There, there, John').*
[In a conversation with John Shade's wife:] *'Speaking of novels,' I said, 'you remember we decided once, you, your husband and I, that Proust’s rough masterpiece was a huge, ghoulish fairy tale, an asparagus dream, totally unconnected with any possible people in any historical France, a sexual travestissement and a colossal farce, the vocabulary of genius and its poetry, but no more,'* and,
*In Zembla, where most females are freckled blondes, we have the saying: belwif ivurkumpf wid snew ebanumf, 'A beautiful woman should be like a compass rose of ivory with four parts of ebony.'*
Additionally, Kinbote has a perverted mind relating to pubescent males, including these Paphian passages in his commentary:
*the little angler, a honey-skinned lad, naked except for a pair of torn dungarees, one trouser leg rolled up, frequently fed with nougat and nuts, but then school started or the weather changed*
'When stripped and shiny in the mist of the bath house, his bold virilia contrasted harshly with his girlish grace.'
I learned a new word, 'virilia.' I'll let you look it up...or guess.
Often hilarious asides to the running *commentary* on the poem hit you out of the blue. Such as Kinbote's significant problems in consummating his marriage to Princess Disa.
'He farced himself with aphrodisiacs, but the anterior characters of her unfortunate sex kept fatally putting him off. One night when he tried tiger tea, and hopes rose high, he made the mistake of begging her to comply with an expedient which she made the mistake of denouncing as unnatural and disgusting. Finally he told her that an old riding accident was incapacitating him but that a cruise with his pals and a lot of sea bathing would be sure to restore his strength.'
Also, Kinbote discloses his frequent infidelities, resulting in problems with Princess Disa.
'He ... solemnly [swore] he had given up, or at least would give up, the practices of his youth; but everywhere along the road powerful temptations stood at attention. He succumbed to them from time to time, then every other day, then several times daily—especially during the robust regime of Harfar Baron of Shalksbore, a phenomenally endowed young brute.... Curdy Buff—as Harfar was nicknamed by his admirers—had a huge escort of acrobats and bareback riders, and the whole affair rather got out of hand so that Disa, upon unexpectedly returning from a trip to Sweden, found the Palace transformed into a circus'
A highest recommendation. My apologies for the size of this; I hope it's not too much to take it all in. It was not nearly as hard as I thought. I am just now coming to realize the depth of Nabokov's cunning linguistics. I wish I could hit that, or even near that level.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
3 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Reviews by L
- 06-11-15
Maybe the greatest novel ever written
Would you consider the audio edition of Pale Fire to be better than the print version?
Yes. Poetry is meant to be read aloud, and hearing Pale Fire (the poem) read to me was a different and deeper experience than reading it.
What other book might you compare Pale Fire to and why?
I'm going to go with Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49." Both are excellent metafictive examples.
Have you listened to any of Marc Vietor’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
I think so, and I obviously liked this one better as I recall it.
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
Several! The book toys with your emotions -- heavy-handed comedy at one point, melodrama at another, and real human pain to chase it all away, before dropping you back into the madcap world of Kinbote's fever-dreams.
Any additional comments?
You owe it to yourself to listen to this.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- David - CO
- 01-04-18
story not well structured for an audio book
listening to someone read an index from front to back is less than enthralling -
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
1 person found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- eblack
- 10-02-21
Not recommended for first read-through
Pale fire is obviously not meant for an audio medium. That said, I would absolutely recommend the book in its original form to anyone. If you are familiar with the poem and the way that the commentary interacts with and meanders from it, this audiobook can be very pleasant to listen to.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- Michael
- 11-29-17
Great Book, Not Fit for Audible (get text)
Great Book, Not Fit for Audible (get text)
This is a great book, but this novel just did not work in audio. The book is very funny, clever, and interesting, and is a twisty tale revealed only by following the footnoted references (which are sometimes references to other footnotes). Understanding all the levels of this story is virtually impossible (unless you have eidetic memory) without a text version available for reference. This has been called a Metanovel and has been used as an example of hypertext linking. Hypertext would be a great way to present this novel...audible is about the worst. Nabokov did a less extreme kind of thing in "Ada, or Ardor" which also did not work in Audible format.
I did not find this book dark at all, it was very funny. At one level it pokes fun at editors and literary critics and literary analysis. At another level it presents a quite unreliable narrator who reveals deeper and deeper levels of unreliability as the story progresses and footnotes are followed and deciphered. It seems to me Nabokov intended this to be pealed like an onion.
The narration was excellent and the book is not bad in audible, but it seems to miss the point and most of the intended fun of the novel.
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!
8 people found this helpful
-
Overall
-
Performance
-
Story
- rmchambe
- 09-08-24
Not great as an audiobook
Definitely worth buying a physical copy due to the extensive footnotes. The audiobook is utter nonsense
Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You voted on this review!
You reported this review!