The Ghost Writer

No Nobel Prize again for Philip Roth? No matter. You can still read him, and if you haven't before, you might start here. I've loved, variously, Goodbye, Columbus, The Counterlife, Operation Shylock, American Pastoral, I Married a Communist, The Plot Against America—heck, even Indignation—but the one I love best is this slim gem, at once audacious and decorous, in which young writer Nathan Zuckerman makes a pilgrimage to the reclusive master E.I. Lonoff and concocts an infatuation with a woman who may or may not be Anne Frank. (Or if you think the idea of a decorous Roth defeats the whole purpose there's always Sabbath's Theater.)