-
Your next favorite book
is waiting.
Like Rip Van Winkle returning to his hometown to find that all has changed, Nathan Zuckerman comes back to New York, the city he left eleven years before. Alone on his New England mountain, Zuckerman has been nothing but a writer: no voices, no media, no terrorist threats, no women, no news, no tasks other than his work and the enduring of old age.
Walking the streets like a revenant, he quickly makes three connections that explode his carefully protected solitude. One is with a young couple with whom, in a rash moment, he offers to swap homes. But from the time he meets them, Zuckerman also wants to swap his solitude for the erotic challenge of the young woman, Jamie. The second connection is with a figure from Zuckerman's youth, Amy Bellette, companion and muse to Zuckerman's first literary hero, E. I. Lonoff. The third connection is with Lonoff's would-be biographer, a young literary hound who will do and say nearly anything to get to Lonoff's "great secret."
"Roth's voice is wise and full of rueful wit, but the plot is contrived ... and the tone hovers dangerously close to pathetic." - PW.
" While not one of Roth's strongest works, this novel has all the elements: unreliable narrators, authorial games, meditations on the use and abuse of literature, and a firm grounding in the reality of post-9/11 New York." - Library Journal.
"Starred Review. [A]gonizingly real yet gorgeously rendered..." - Booklist.
This information about Exit Ghost was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Philip Roth was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1933. He attended Rutgers University before receiving his B.A. at Bucknell and his M.A. from the University of Chicago. He served in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1956. He taught English at a number of universities including the University of Pennsylvania where he was writer-in-residence for fifteen years. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus and Five Short Stories, was published in 1959 and won the National Book Award for fiction. Patrimony (1991) was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award, Operation Shylock (1993) of the PEN/Faulkner Award, Sabbath's Theater (1995) of the National Book Award. American Pastoral was his twentieth book. In 2005, he became the third living American writer to have his work published in a ...
If you liked Exit Ghost, try these:
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher
by Timothy Egan
Published 2013
How a lone man's epic obsession led to one of America's greatest cultural treasures: Prize-winning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history -- and the driven, brilliant man who made them.
by Elizabeth Kostova
Published 2010
Kostova's masterful new novel travels from American cities to the coast of Normandy, from the late 19th century to the late 20th, from young love to last love. The Swan Thieves is a story of obsession, history's losses, and the power of art to preserve human hope.
by Brian Hall
Published 2009
A fascinating and exquisitely written novel about the art and life of Robert Frost.
Great political questions stir the deepest nature of one-half the nation, but they pass far above and over the ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Can you name the title?
Test your book knowledge with our daily trivia challenge!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
