Ghost Town: Tales of Manhattan Then and Now (Writer and the City) - Hardcover

McGrath, Patrick

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582343128 ISBN 13: 9781582343129

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2005

Synopsis

One of our most celebrated writers tackles one of our most celebrated cities.

In the newest addition to the Writer in the City series, acclaimed novelist Patrick McGrath presents three stories about New York City spanning three centuries. "The Year of the Gibbet" tells the tale of a young boy during the American Revolution, whose mother is hanged for defying the British army―and the tortured sense of complicity the boy carries with him for the remainder of his life. In "Julius," a wealthy merchant at the time of the Civil War punishes his son's passion for the arts by denying him the girl he loves, driving the boy to insanity. And "Ground Zero," situated in modern day Manhattan, tells the disquieting story of a psychiatrist who becomes infatuated with one of her patients, a man who began visiting a prostitute after the events of 9/11. A masterful selection of tales wracked with erotic obsession, madness, and class warfare, and ranging in style from the gothic to the coolly analytical, Ghost Town is a paean to a city that has always inspired and captivated the world.

About this title

About the Author

Patrick McGrath is the author of numerous novels, including Port Mungo, Asylum, Spider, The Grotesque, and Martha Peake: A Novel of the Revolution. He lives in New York.

Reviews

Beneath Manhattan's ever-changing skyline, familial betrayal and guilt remain hauntingly constant in these three juicy novellas, the latest in Bloomsbury's Writer in the City series. In "The Year of the Gibbet," set in the burned-out, British-occupied city of 1777, a boy inadvertently exposes his mother as a spy for General Washington; after she is hanged, her ghost returns to torment him. "Julius" moves ahead to the Civil War era to tell the Jamesian saga of a weak-minded art student who goes insane when his wealthy businessman father breaks up his love affair with a lowborn artists' model. "Ground Zero" is the tale of a man who begins a relationship with a prostitute who keeps seeing the specter of her lover, a man killed in the attack on the World Trade Center. It's told from the viewpoint of the man's jealous psychiatrist, who gradually allows her voice of psychoanalytic detachment to take on a vengeful tone of post-9/11 paranoia. McGrath (Asylum, etc.) sets these stories against the burgeoning city and its stew of sublime aspiration, corrupt failure, and sexual and class antagonisms. He writes in a range of registers, but complicates each with a subtle, empathetic humanism.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582343128
• ISBN 13: 9781582343129
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 243