Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov [FIRST EDITION / 1959]

Invitation to a Beheading by Vladimir Nabokov 

U.S. FIRST EDITION / FIRST PRINTING [1959] G.P. PUTNAM'S SONS

Hardcover with dust jacket.  

Dust jacket has chipping to edges and tanning.  General wear and a sealed tear to lower front of DJ.   Front panel with original price of $3.95 in tact. 

Book itself is gorgeous; pristine boards and spine.  Pages read like new! 

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. Cincinnatus spends his final days in an absurd jail, where he is visited by chimerical jailers, an executioner who masquerades as a fellow prisoner, and by his in-laws, who lug their furniture with them into his prison cell.