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

McGrath, Patrick

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1596912286 ISBN 13: 9781596912281

Publisher: Bloomsbury USA, 2006

Synopsis

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

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.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Bloomsbury USA
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 1596912286
• ISBN 13: 9781596912281
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 256