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Shop nowThe Ghost Writer
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Learn moreThe 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 in the Nathan Zuckerman series, 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.
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 twice won the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. He 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.” 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. 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. He died in 2018.
Malcolm Hillgartner has narrated over 175 audiobooks. He was named an AudioFile Best Voice of 2013. His work ranges from children's titles such as On the Blue Comet (AudioFile Best of 2011, Earphones), and Neal Stevenson's sci-fi epic REAMDE (Audible.com Best of 2011) to the biographies Kissinger (AudioFile Best of 2013, Earphones) and Cheever (AudioFile Best of 2009, Earphones). He is also an accomplished actor, writer, and musician. With his wife and partner, Jahnna Beecham, he has written over 130 books for teens and young readers, as well as the musicals Chaps! and The Best Christmas Pageant Ever Musical, which have been produced in the U.S. and Canada.
Reviews
“Arguably Philip Roth’s best novel…In The Ghost Writer, published in 1979, Mr. Roth found the virtually perfect balance for the themes that have long obsessed him, most notably the tension between being a loyal Jewish son, in terms of both family and community, and being an unfettered creative writer.”
“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.”
“I had only to read the two opening sentences to realize that I was once again in the hands of a superbly endowed storyteller.”
“Roth underlines none of [the] elegant theme-weaving, letting it all emerge through dazzling dialogue and his most understated, almost folktale-like prose…Elegantly floating and at the same time firmly grounded to home and heart—a sonata-like masterwork.”
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