Invitation to a Beheading

I hope that one day I can live life with the remorseless vivacity of M'sieur Pierre.

In a world where translucency is valued and opaqueness is a social sin, a man finds himself convicted of a crime he didn't commit, but can't plead innocent to. In Invitation to a Beheading we get to spend some time with him as he awaits his impending decapitation.

I don't think anyone else could have pulled this off, but Nabokov brilliantly, as usual, blurs the lines between fiction and science fiction and delivers a great story.