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.