NEW YORK (AP) — So long, Nathan Zuckerman.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 autumn.

“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 yesterday in a statement.

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

“Bedeviled 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.

Mortality is also the theme of the 73-year-old Roth’s current novel, “Everyman,” which he has said was inspired in part by the death of his close friend, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow.