The Ghost Writer - Hardcover

Philip Roth

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224017640 ISBN 13: 9780224017640

Publisher: Farar Straus Giroux, 1979

Synopsis

The Ghost Writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E. I. Lonoff.

At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress. Zuckerman, with his active, youthful imagination, wonders if she could be the paradigmatic victim of Nazi persecution. If she were, it might change his life.

The first volume of the trilogy and epilogue Zuckerman Bound, The Ghost Writer is about the tensions between literature and life, artistic truthfulness and conventional decency—and about those implacable practitioners who live with the consequences of sacrificing one for the other.

About this title

About the Author

In 1997 Philip Roth won the Pulitzer Prize for American Pastoral. In 1998 he received the National Medal of Arts at the White House and in 2002 the highest award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Gold Medal in Fiction. He has twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He has won the PEN/Faulkner Award three times. In 2005 The Plot Against America received the Society of American Historians’ Prize for “the outstanding historical novel on an American theme for 2003-2004.” Recently Roth received PEN’s two most prestigious awards: in 2006 the PEN/Nabokov Award and in 2007 the PEN/Bellow Award for achievement in American fiction. Roth is the only living American novelist to have his work published in a comprehensive, definitive edition by the Library of America. In 2011 he received the National Humanities Medal at the White House, and was later named the fourth recipient of the Man Booker International Prize.

From the Back Cover

"Roth's most controlled and elegant work...serious, intelligent, dramatic, acutely vivid, slyly and wickedly funny...seductive far beyond its brief efficiency." —Village Voice

"I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller." —Robert Towers, The New York Review of Books

"Further evidence that Roth can do practically anything with fiction. His narrative power—the ability to delight the reader simultaneously with the telling and the tale—is superb." —Washington Post

Reviews

Both these novels follow protagonist Nathan Zuckerman through different times in his life?Ghost Writer, dubbed a "glowing work of fiction" by LJ's reviewer (LJ 9/1/79), introduced the character in his youth, while 1981's Unbound offers him in his mid-30s. Roth's many fans will be happy to see these again.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Farar Straus Giroux
• Publication date: 1979
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0224017640
• ISBN 13: 9780224017640
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256