"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 "As a literary tour de force it surpasses anything else Mr. Nabokov has done." –
Atlantic Monthly "Scintillating, brilliantly inventive...[
Pale Fire] has almost as many layers of meaning as an artichoke has petals." –
Commonwealth "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 "Nabokov writes prose the only way it should be written, that is, ecstatically." –John Updike