
Michael Chabon is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist, and short story writer. Born in Washington, D.C., he spent a year studying at Carnegie Mellon University before transferring to the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He subsequently received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 24. He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel, was published in 2007 and won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch", concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2004. He followed Telegraph Avenue in November 2016 with his latest novel, Moonglow, a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989. Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. He often includes gay, bisexual, and Jewish characters in his work. Since the late 1990s, he has written in increasingly diverse styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction, and, along with novels, has published screenplays, children's books, comics, and newspaper serials.
WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE The beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Now with special bonus material by Michael Chabon. A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly
Leaping onto center stage from the wings of comics history comes that dazzling Master of Elusion, foe of tyranny, and champion of liberation - the Escapist. Operating from a secret headquarters under the boards of the Empire Theater, the Escapist and his crack team of associates roam the globe performing amazing feats of magic and coming to the aid of all those who languish in the chains of oppression. The history of the Escapist's creators Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay was recently chronicled in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Now the best of the Escapist's adventures are collected into one volume for all to enjoy.
For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown. But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his life—and also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murder—right under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritage—and with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears. At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.(front flap)
In his first novel since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Chabon presents a hilarious and heartbreaking work—the story of the friendship between the "wonder boys"—Grady, an aging writer who has lost his way, and Crabtree, whose relentless debauchery is capsizing his career.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.
The enthralling debut from bestselling novelist Michael Chabon is a penetrating narrative of complex friendships, father-son conflicts, and the awakening of a young man’s sexual identity.Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway.The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay set the literary world spinning. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in the movement of American fiction, from a novelist who has become one of the most important and enduring voices of this generation.
As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there - longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart - half tavern, half temple - stands Brokeland. When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life. An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we've been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet.
In deep retirement in the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, vaguely recollected by locals as a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.What is the meaning of the mysterious string of German numbers the bird spews out - a top secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts perhaps? Or something more sinister? Is the solution to this last case - the real explanation of the mysterious boy and his parrot - beyond even the reach of the once-famed sleuth?A short, suspenseful tale of compassion and wit that reimagines the classic nineteenth-century detective story.
Two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates are variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars.
Ethan Feld has never been prone to adventure or attention, especially since he's often ridiculed about his lame baseball playing. But after he awakens one day to find a werefox sitting on his chest, Ethan learns he's ripe for a "fantastic destiny" in the Summerlands -- part of a connected, hidden world, where small American Indian-like ferishers play ball, and evil Coyote is thirsty to destroy the universe. Ethan agrees to the job, but when his father is kidnapped, his mission becomes more personal than he bargained for. With a team of ragtag players called Big Chief Cinquefoil's Traveling Shadowtails All-Star Baseball Club -- including the feisty pitcher Jennifer T., Thor Wignutt (a boy who's not quite a boy), a she-Sasquatch named Taffy, and the Anaheim Angels' Rodrigo Buendía -- Ethan treks through the Summerlands playing against incredible creatures and an impending time limit, hoping to reach his dad. Little does he know, however, that his abilities will be tested in the biggest baseball showdown of all time.Chabon successfully weaves an American-made fantasy, incorporating Native American lore, tall tales, and our nation's greatest pastime to make a modern-day tale of good versus evil.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author--"an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)--offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction. A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past. What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as--simply because--it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme played--on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key--by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
The author of Wonder Boys returns with a powerful and wonderfully written collection of stories. Caught at moments of change, Chabon's men and women, children and husbands and wives, all face small but momentous decisions. They are caught in events that will crystallize and define their lives forever, and with each, Michael Chabon brings his unique vision and uncanny understanding of our deepest mysteries and our greatest fears.
Michael Chabon's sparkling first book of nonfiction is a love song in sixteen parts - a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.Cover art by Jordan Crane.
By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
“Magical prose stylist” Michael Chabon (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) delivers a collection of essays—heartfelt, humorous, insightful, wise—on the meaning of fatherhood.For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then thirteen, to Paris Men’s Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at “thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties,” sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time. Despite his own indifference, however, what gradually emerged as Chabon ferried his son to and from fashion shows was a deep respect for his son’s passion. The piece quickly became a viral sensation.With the GQ story as its centerpiece, and featuring six additional essays plus an introduction, Pops illuminates the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood as only Michael Chabon can.
Awesome Man can shoot positronic rays out of his eyeballs, fly as straight as an arrow, and hug mutant Jell-O! Even villains like Professor Von Evil and the Flaming Eyeball are no match for this caped crusader.But Awesome Man also has a secret. . . . Can you guess what it is?
A brilliant, idiosyncratic collection of introductions and afterwords (plus some liner notes) by New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon—“one of contemporary literature’s most gifted prose stylists” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading. Chabon asks why anyone would write an introduction, or for that matter, read one. His own daughter Rose prefers to skip them. Chabon's answer is simple and simultaneously "a hope of bringing pleasure for the reader." Likewise, afterwords—they are all about shared pleasure, about the "pure love" of a work of art that has inspired, awakened, transformed the reader. Ultimately, this thought-provoking compendium is a series of love letters and thank-you notes, unified by the simple theme of the shared pleasure of discovery, whether it's the boyhood revelation of the most important story in Chabon's life (Ray Bradbury's "The Rocket Man"); a celebration of "the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars" (Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his character John Carter); a reintroduction to a forgotten master of ghost stories (M. R. James, ironically "the happiest of men"); the recognition that the worlds of Wes Anderson's films are reassembled scale models of our own broken reality (as is all art); Chabon's own rude awakening from the muse as he writes his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; or a playful parody of lyrical interpretation in the liner notes for Mark Ronson's Uptown Special, the true purpose of which, Chabon insists, is to "spread the gospel of sensible automotive safety and maintenance practices."Galaxies away from academic or didactic, Bookends celebrates wonder—and like the copy of The Phantom Tollbooth handed to young Michael by a friend of his father he never saw again—it is a treasured gift.
This volume of The Escapist collects issues five and six of the popular, Eisner Award winning quarterly series and features the late Will Eisner's return to the Spirit, in a crossover tale with the Escapist! Fans of classic comics will not want to miss what became Eisner's last comics work, completed just two weeks before the death of the legendary comics godfather. Also in this volume is the comics writing debut of award-winning author and Guggenheim fellow Chris Offutt, illustrated by Thomas Yeates. Dan Best and Eddie Campbell contribute a fully painted story from the 1939 World's Fair in Empire City, and 2004 Russ Manning Award winner Eric Wight brings a polemic story from writer Jason Hall to life. Among the other notable contributors are Howard Chaykin, Paul Grist, Shawn Martinbrough, David Hahn, Roy Thomas, Matt Wagner and indie stalwarts Jeffrey Brown and Jason!
Leaping onto center stage from the wings of comics history comes that dazzling Master of Elusion, foe of tyranny, and champion of liberation--the Escapist. Operating from a secret headquarters under the boards of the Empire Theater, the Escapist and his crack team of associates roam the globe performing amazing feats of magic and coming to the aid of all those who languish in the chains of oppression. The history of the Escapist's creators, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay was recently chronicled in Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Now the best of the Escapist's adventures are collected into a giant 80-page anthology for all to enjoy.Don't miss out on this thrilling first issue of the quarterly anthology Michael Chabon Presents...The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist, featuring an original story penned by Michael Chabon as well as the first new story in seven years written and drawn by comics creator Howard Chaykin
"Me llamo Edward Satterlee, y durante los últimos doce años he servido con fidelidad al condado de Yuggogheny en calidad de fiscal del distrito, en una serie de casos que demasiado a menudo han derivado hacia lo grotesco y lo estrafalario. Llevo a cabo el siguiente informe sin confiar en que nadie se lo crea, ni me crea a mí, y le suplico al lector que considere esto, al menos en parte, como mi carta de dimisión."
In the fictional world of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , the Escapist--the epitome of Golden Age superhero--was conceived. This anthology is a collection of the hero's history and his exploits, created by an all-star cast of comic book luminaries.The Escapist and his associates are heroes to all who languish in oppression's chains. They roam the globe, performing amazing feats to foil diabolical evildoers. From preventing a prison break and attack on Empire City, to facing a demonic horde in Japan, to crushing a galactic takeover in the year 2966, and to surfacing a sunken submarine from 300 fathoms, the Escapist brings hope and liberation.As the history of his creators, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, was chronicled in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay , now a multitude of the Escapist's adventures are collected here, along with the patchwork publishing history of the character. This volume also contains the adventures of the Escapist's associate, Luna Moth. The stories and art within are by amazing talent like Brian K. Vaughan ( Saga, Y--The Last Man ), Kyle Baker ( The Fifth Beatle ), Eduardo Barreto ( Batman ), Howard Chaykin ( American Flagg, Star Wars ), Gene Colan ( Daredevil, Howard the Duck ), Matt Kindt ( Pistolwhip ), Kevin McCarthy ( Circuit-Breaker ), Bill Sienkiewicz ( Assassin ), Jim Starlin ( Captain Marvel ) and, of course, Michael Chabon.Containing a total of twenty-six tales, along with two never-before-collected stories, this volume also contains six never-before-published stories, as well as a robust gallery of pinups celebrating the world of the Escapist from artists including Brian Bolland ( Judge Dredd ), Jöelle Jones ( Lady Killer ), Mike Mignola ( Hellboy ), Eric Wight ( My Dead Girlfriend ), Jae Lee ( Before Watchmen ), and more!
Awesome Man must prepare for his greatest threat yet!Awesome Man’s secret identity has stayed safe, and he’s still the coolest superhero around. He loves protecting the people of Awesome City from evildoers, like the giant Plutonian octolizard, with his trusty sidekick, Moskowitz. But there have been reports that a new hero is coming to town soon. What if the people of Awesome City no longer need Awesome Man?
Golden-Age superhero, the Escapist--master of elusion, champion of liberation--was conceived in the fictional world of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. This comic book anthology contains a variety of the Escapist's exploits, and details on the history of the character.Master of elusion and foe of tyranny, from his secret headquarters beneath the majestic Empire Theater, the Escapist and his associates have been defeating the crooked and coming to the aid of those in need for generations. From obstructing the endeavors of post-war Nazis, to protecting the innocent from an attack on the World's Fair, to infiltrating behind enemy lines to free prisoners of war in Vietnam, and even to stymieing a hypnotizing saxophone player, the Escapist does not suffer oppression of any kind. A multitude of the Escapist's pulse-pounding adventures are collected here along with details of the publishing history of Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay's creation. This volume also contains a story torn straight from the pages of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay written by Michael Chabon, the tale of the mysterious Mr. Machine Gun. Also featured, from another Kavalier & Clay classic publication, Weird Date, are two stories of romance, crime, and mystery. This collection features comic book creators of legend, including Will Eisner (The Spirit), Eduardo Barreto (Batman), Jeffrey Brown (Star Wars: Darth Vader and Son), Howard Chaykin (American Flagg, Star Wars), Paul Gulacy (Master of Kung Fu), Jeff Parker (Bucko), Marv Wolfman (The Tomb of Dracula), Thomas Yeates (Prince Valiant), and so many more!Containing a total of twenty-two tales, along with three never-before-collected stories, this volume also contains five never-before-published stories, as well as a robust gallery of pinups celebrating the world of the Escapist from artists including Gabriel Ba (The Umbrella Academy, Casanova) Brian Bolland (Judge Dredd), Bill Morrison (The Simpsons), Fabio Moon (Serenity, Casanova), Tim Sale (Batman, Superman), and many more!
by Michael Chabon
Rating: 4.4 ⭐
A short story published by Chabon that consist of material apparently written for the novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay but not included. Originally published in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (2001) before being republished in paperback alone.