Ghost Lights

Lydia Millet

Paperback

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Ghost Lights stars an IRS bureaucrat named Hal--a man baffled by his wife's obsession with her missing employer. In a moment of drunken heroism, Hal embarks on a quest to find the man, embroiling himself in a surreal tropical adventure (and an unexpected affair with a beguiling German woman). Ghost Lights is Lydia Millet at her best--beautifully written, engaging, full of insight into the heartbreaking devotion of parenthood and the charismatic oddity of human behavior.

Book Details

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Publish Date: Nov 5th, 2012
Pages: 256
Language: English
Edition: undefined - undefined
Dimensions: 8.20in - 5.40in - 0.80in - 0.45lb
EAN: 9780393343458
Categories: • Literary• Humorous - Black Humor

About the Author

Millet, Lydia: - Lydia Millet is the author of A Children's Bible, a finalist for the National Book Award and a New York Times Top 10 book of 2020, among other works of fiction. She has won awards from PEN Center USA and the American Academy of Arts and Letters and been shortlisted for the National Book Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Her story collection Love in Infant Monkeys was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. She has a master's degree in environmental economics and lives in Tucson, Arizona, and Camden, Maine.

Praise for this book

[Millet's] writing is always flawlessly beautiful, reaching for an experience that precedes language itself.--Laura Miller "Salon"

Strange, alternately quirky, and profound.--Josh Emmons "New York Times Book Review"

Gorgeous...If literature can under the best circumstances transport, then Millet's extraordinary vision brings us in on the float.--Minna Proctor "Bookforum"

A yarn about marriage, fatherhood, and idealism, its every page idiosyncratically entertaining, amusing, and insightful. Millet proves she might have Jonathan Franzen beat at expertly mixing the political and domestic.-- "Martha Stewart Whole Living"

Millet is that rare writer of ideas who can turn a ruminative passage into something deeply personal. She can also be wickedly funny, most often at the expense of the unexamined life.--Tricia Springstubb "Cleveland Plain Dealer"

Richly imagined.-- "Vanity Fair"

With its linguistic and plot pranks and underlying moral complexity, Ghost Lights recalls the laconic, Lacanian novels of Paul Auster. Like Auster, Millet presents a disoriented postmodern hero who becomes a willing but only marginally competent detective in a mystery that requires a series of absurd divagations leading to a life-changing or life-threatening existential inquiry.--Carolyn Cooke "San Francisco Chronicle"

Millet...skillfully interweaves the personal and the political, making Hal's journey both specific and universal.--Christine DeZelar-Tiedman "Library Journal"

Thrilling, witty, and philosophical.--Kimberly Cutter "Marie Claire"

Millet is a gifted writer, often dropping droll and sardonic throw-away lines of surprisingly smart humor.-- "Kirkus Reviews"