Goodbye, Nathan Zuckerman

Philip Roth is writing the last Nathan Zuckerman novel, 28 years after the publications of the first.

Philip Roth's fictional alter ego, a famous Jewish novelist featured in such novels as The Ghost Writer and the Pulitzer Prize-winning American Pastoral, will appear for the last time in Roth's Exit Ghost, coming out next fall.

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"Houghton Mifflin is thrilled to be publishing Philip Roth's ninth and last Zuckerman novel in October 2007, 28 years after the publication of The Ghost Writer," Houghton Mifflin publisher Janet Silver said Thursday in a statement.

According to Houghton Mifflin, Exit Ghost is a "portrait of the artist as an old man."

"Bedevilled by the powers he's lost, fearful of losing the powers that remain - and that are vital to his vocation - Nathan Zuckerman returns to New York after 11 years of living as a solitary, reclusive writer in the rural hills of western Massachusetts. "His encounters in New York with a new generation of writers and with an old, dying friend produce revelations that gravely unsettle him and make of the final Zuckerman book a moving study of obsession, forgetfulness, resignation, and ungratifiable desire," the statement reads.