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Search - Ziff: A Life?

Ziff A Life
Author: Alan Lelchuk

A wildly inventive novel pitting two writers in a literary rivalry with their careers and lives on the line, from an author whose earlier books have been praised by Saul Bellow, Wallace Stegner, Mordecai Richler and Philip Roth, among other critics. — Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or a brilliant literary trickster? A true... more » master or a clever tactician who subtly seduces critics and the reading public alike? It is narrator Danny Levitan's job to learn who Ziff really is in this compelling novel about the writing life that is by turns comic and provocative, ingenious and anguished, and consistently a gripping reading experience.

Serious literature and sensational publishing collide when Levitan, once a well-known novelist now reduced to obscurity, is offered a lucrative advance to write a biography of Ziff. The scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world's literary heavyweights, Ziff has always plotted his books and his career with predatory efficiency. For years he has also shared secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff is disturbed with the prospect of this biography by his old pal, and determined to thwart it by persuasion, cajolery, seduction, and outright threat.

Danny's enterprise as literary detective takes him from the Berkshires and Manhattan to Rome and Budapest in a series of adventures at once comic, exuberant, sexual, and outrageous. It also introduces him to Eva Kertesz, Ziff's Hungarian confidante, who leads Danny to revelations about the controversial writer that are as stunning as they are surprising. With humor and heartbreak, Danny chronicles his odyssey into the land of Ziff and records the hard-won truths he discovers there, about his own career and about a writer who has woven an artistic identity from threads of fiction while ruthlessly crafting his novels with grist from his own life and the lives of his friends, including Danny's own.

An unabashed look at the forging of literary careers (and the lives ravaged in the wake of character development) and a heady brew of books within a book -- the biography, which Danny composes in the course of the novel, and excerpts from Ziff's works -- Ziff: A Life? examines the souls of two writers while exploring their evolving friendship and rivalry. The verbal combat is tough and witty amid a plot filled with unforeseen twists and turns, all leading to the ironic ending of a rich and memorable novel that peers through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.

ISBN-13: 9780786711154
ISBN-10: 0786711159
Publication Date: 1/22/2003
Pages: 432
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Carroll & Graf
Book Type: Hardcover
Other Versions: Paperback
Members Wishing: 0
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Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> General
Literature & Fiction >> General >> Classics
Literature & Fiction >> General >> Contemporary
Literature & Fiction >> General >> Literary
Literature & Fiction >> History & Criticism >> Criticism & Theory >> General
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