
Pale Fire
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Narrated by:
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Marc Vietor
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Robert Blumenfeld
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By:
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Vladimir Nabokov
About this listen
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.
©1962 Vera Nabokov and Dmitri Nabokov (P)2010 Audible, IncListeners also enjoyed...
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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.
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-
Speak, Mnemosyne!
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By: Vladimir Nabokov
-
Invitation to a Beheading
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
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- Unabridged
-
Overall
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Performance
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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
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-
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- Narrated by: Robert Blumenfeld
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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Overall
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Performance
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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.
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An Absolutely Gorgeous Audible Experience
- By Jim on 10-26-05
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Stories of Vladimir Nabokov
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Arthur Morey
- Length: 31 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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A Kaleidoscope of Nabokov Bábochkas
- By Darwin8u on 01-11-15
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Mary
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 4 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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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....
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There IS something about Mary!
- By Darwin8u on 12-22-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Enchanter
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Christopher Lane
- Length: 2 hrs and 56 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Nabokov's black salad devouring a green rabbit
- By Darwin8u on 10-14-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Under the Volcano
- A Novel
- By: Malcolm Lowry
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 14 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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On the Day of the Dead, in 1938, Geoffrey Firmin, an alcoholic and ruined man, is fatefully living out his last day, drowning himself in mescal while his former wife and half-brother look on, powerless to help him. The events of this one day unfold against a backdrop unforgettable for its evocation of a Mexico at once magical and diabolical.
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Excellent...but not for everyone
- By Melinda on 12-07-10
By: Malcolm Lowry
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A Dance to the Music of Time: First Movement
- By: Anthony Powell
- Narrated by: Simon Vance
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
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Anthony Powell's universally acclaimed epic encompasses a four-volume panorama of twentieth century London. Hailed by Time as "brilliant literary comedy as well as a brilliant sketch of the times," A Dance to the Music of Time opens just after World War I. Amid the fever of the 1920s and the first chill of the 1930s, Nick Jenkins and his friends confront sex, society, business, and art.
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It is no good being a beauty alone...
- By Darwin8u on 02-24-16
By: Anthony Powell
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The Real Life of Sebastian Knight
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luke Daniels
- Length: 6 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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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.”
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A dry run at big, complex themes
- By Darwin8u on 12-08-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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Pnin
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Luís David García Márquez
- Length: 6 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Pnin está considerada como "la más deliciosa de las novelas de Nabokov" (G. M. Hyde), "la más inmediatamente atractiva" (Laurie Clancy) y, posiblemente, la más divertida de toda su obra, tan rebosante de humor. Su protagonista es el profesor Pnin, un ruso de la emigración que se gana la vida dando clases a media docena escasa de alumnos desganados que acuden a su aula como quien va a ver una película de Buster Keaton.
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Tin Drum
- A New Translation by Breon Mitchell
- By: Günter Grass
- Narrated by: Richard Powers
- Length: 25 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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To mark the 50th anniversary of the original publication of this runaway best seller, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, along with Grass' publishers all over the world, offer a new translation of this classic novel. Breon Mitchell, acclaimed translator and scholar, has drawn from many sources. The result is a translation that is faithful to Grass' style and rhythm, restores omissions, and reflects more fully the complexity of the original work. After 50 years, The Tin Drum has, if anything, gained in power and relevance.
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It's a metaphor, right?
- By Barry on 08-11-12
By: Günter Grass
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The Gift
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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A complex and rich Künstlerroman
- By Darwin8u on 11-30-13
By: Vladimir Nabokov
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The Luzhin Defense
- By: Vladimir Nabokov
- Narrated by: Mel Foster
- Length: 8 hrs and 37 mins
- Unabridged
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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.
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Life and chess are such lonely battles
- By Darwin8u on 11-13-12
By: Vladimir Nabokov
elegant prose and clever humor
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Genius
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Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
With all certainty, T am sure it will lead to greater things by Nabokov.What was one of the most memorable moments of Pale Fire?
The reading of the Cantos Poem and the reader,s display of his great voice, all of Audible's telling of this great book is wonderful, for sure magic.Which scene was your favorite?
There is not a particular scene of merit, Nabokov goes on and on and each momemt if studied is a thrill in each novel he creates.Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
I read this book very much younger, like with Lolita I could not find the pace of the information, now as my experience in the library increased, I love his writing. One must understand Nabokov, he teases one for reaction only, which he knows a studied reader will enjoy, I always laugh, hand over mouth not to insult him, but the whole experience is fully an act by both me and the writer, a very personal thing, he being the genius, of course. I love Nabokov for years, my confession to all, he never fails me!Any additional comments?
Nabokov asks me to spend every molecule, of many, of my restless mind with a net gathering frail butterflies, as his example, in this he teaches the ways of life which are simple for complicated wanderers, like me and you.Butterfly Frail
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absurdist amusing
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I laughed out loud at a few lines and then I felt this rather sad pathos start to come over me. It's just a spoof, right? A brilliant spoof, but the book is merely satire and so we shouldn't be disturbed by it. But it is disturbing and it runs a lot deeper than spoof.
The feeling you'll experience are real.
Even the title...
Give it a chance. Buy a hard copy. Try. It's certainly one of the finest assembly of words ever.
Brilliant, Touching and Fun
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Interesting
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Brilliant performance, dazzling witty novel
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A Gentle Ghost of a Poet
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Wonderfully Complex Story Aided by Matching Narration
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It's okay
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