Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov

Consciousness, performance, and the impossibility of authentic selfhood under surveillance Nabokov wrote Invitation to a Beheading in two weeks in 1934. It reads like it. The prose is feverish, hallucinatory, and exact in the way that only genuinely strange minds manage. The result is one of the most unusual novels of the twentieth century — part Kafka, part carnival, part meditation on what it means to be a self in a world that demands you perform one. Over four reading sprints, you will move through Cincinnatus C.'s imprisonment and execution with four interdisciplinary frameworks that will make you see the novel differently than a first reading allows. This companion is not a summary. It assumes you are reading alongside it.