An Honest Ghost: A Novel

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Synopsis
A 2013 "Books of the Year" -Times Literary Supplement & John Ashbery "6 Great Books to Read"-Readers Digest "19 Books You Shouldn't Have Overlooked in 2013"-Slate "An impressionistic portrait of literary subjectivity. . . revealing the opportunities for pleasure and refuge available to the inveterate reader. " - Lambda Literary "A masterful act of literary ventriloquism. " - Huffington Post Books Inspired by the task of unpacking his library, the narrator returns to writing an autobiographical novel about the sudden appearance of his son, Joe, who at age nine shows up on the narrator's doorstep for the first time. The narrator, unnerved by the prospect of sharing his life with his extremely precocious child, is nonetheless moved by Joe's arrival. He has to change his own life by accepting the responsibility of fatherhood, a role he shares slightly with his young English boyfriend, David. Joe's unpredictable mother, Eleanor Sullivan, seeks her own satisfactions. The domestic scene is affected when David introduces a new friend, Roy Hardeman, a strange gay cop who dies as mysteriously as he arrived. The heart of the novel is the ghostly, persistent, unreliable qualities of literary and personal memory, and the ways in which a narrative can hold onto, recapture, and transform memory. Rick Whitaker's semi-autobiographical novel, An Honest Ghost, consists entirely of sentences appropriated from over 500 books. Whitaker limited himself to using 300 words per book (in accordance with Fair Use); never taking two sentences together; and never making any changes, even to punctuation. In the iBook version, touching a sentence brings up its original source: a book's title, author, and page number. The experience of acknowledging each sentence as literary artifact, combined with the imagined accretion of books that built An Honest Ghost, deftly mirrors the burgeoning nostalgia in the narrator's voice and, fittingly, in the careful reader's heart.
Copyright:
2013

Book Details

Book Quality:
Excellent
Book Size:
210 Pages
ISBN-13:
9781937543389
Publisher:
Jaded Ibis Press
Date of Addition:
Copyrighted By:
Rick Whitaker
Adult content:
No
Language:
English
Has Image Descriptions:
No
Categories:
Biographies and Memoirs, Literature and Fiction, Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender
Submitted By:
Terry Gorman
Proofread By:
Terry Gorman
Usage Restrictions:
This is a copyrighted book.

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