Moonglow

Moonglow
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 414
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 006222557X

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal’s Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next Bestseller "This book is beautiful.” — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us. 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 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content)

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (with bonus content)
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Random House
Total Pages: 705
Release: 2012-06-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0812993675

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize 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. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Gentlemen of the Road

Gentlemen of the Road
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Del Rey
Total Pages: 178
Release: 2008-12-18
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307495655

#1 SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE “A picaresque, swashbuckling adventure.”—The Washington Post Book World They’re an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa a.d. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can—as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the gullible from their money. But when they are dragooned into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire, they soon find themselves the half-willing generals in a full-scale revolution—on a road paved with warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the grandest adventures are made of. Praise for Gentlemen of the Road “Within a few pages I was happily tangled in [Chabon’s] net of finely filigreed language, seduced by an old-school-style swashbuckling quest . . . laced with surprises and humor.”—San Francisco Chronicle “[Chabon] is probably the premiere prose stylist—the Updike—of his generation.”—Time “The action is intricate and exuberant. . . . It’s hard to resist its gathering momentum, not to mention the sheer headlong pleasure of Chabon’s language.”—The New York Times Book Review “[A] wild, wild adventure . . . abounds with lush language . . . This book roars to be read aloud.”—Chicago Sun-Times

Summerland

Summerland
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-04-12
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062418092

From the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Chabon comes this bestselling novel for readers of all ages that blends fantasy and folklore with that most American coming-of-age ritual: baseball—now in a new edition, with an original introduction by the author. Ethan Feld is having a terrible summer: his father has moved them to Clam Island, Washington, where Ethan has quickly established himself as the least gifted baseball player the island has ever seen. Ethan’s luck begins to change, however, when a mysterious baseball scout named Ringfinger Brown and a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-year-old werefox enter his life, dragging Ethan into another world called the Summerlands. But this beautiful, winter-less place is facing destruction at the hands of the villainous Coyote, and it has been prophesized that only Ethan can save it. In this cherished modern classic, the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning author brings his masterful storytelling, dexterous plotting, and singularly envisioned characters to a coming-of-age novel for readers of all ages.

Pops

Pops
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 87
Release: 2018-05-15
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0062834630

“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.

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2011-12-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453234098

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “astonishing” debut novel, about a son’s struggle to find his own identity and integrity (The New York Times). Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Moonglow, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is one of the most acclaimed talents in contemporary fiction. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when Chabon was just twenty-five, is the beautifully crafted debut that propelled him into the literary stratosphere. Art Bechstein may be too young to know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows what he doesn’t want: the life of his father, a man who laundered money for the mob. He spends the summer after graduation finding his own way, experimenting with a group of brilliant and seductive new friends: erudite Arthur Lecomte, who opens up new horizons for Art; mercurial Phlox, who confounds him at every turn; and Cleveland, a poetry-reciting biker who pulls him inevitably back into his father’s mobbed-up world. A New York Times bestseller, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was called “astonishing” by Alice McDermott, and heralded the arrival of one of our era’s great voices. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Manhood for Amateurs

Manhood for Amateurs
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2012-01-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0062124595

The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect. 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: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, 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’s 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, are like 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.

Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 528
Release: 2012-09-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1443420654

New York Times Bestseller “A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time." — Benjamin Percy, Esquire New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture—Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music—and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories. 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, a pair of 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 complications 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.

Wonder Boys

Wonder Boys
Author: Michael Chabon
Publisher: Open Road Media
Total Pages: 439
Release: 2011-12-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1453234101

The “wise, wildly funny story” of a self-destructive writer’s lost weekend by a Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune). A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp must finally confront the wreckage made of his past decisions. Mordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Conversations with Michael Chabon

Conversations with Michael Chabon
Author: Brannon Costello
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2015-04-17
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1626746699

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. A firm believer that reading even the most challenging literature should be a fundamentally pleasurable experience, Chabon has produced an astonishingly diverse body of work that includes detective novels, weird tales of horror, alternate history science fiction, and rollicking chronicles of swashbuckling adventure alongside tender coming-of-age stories, sprawling social novels, and narratives of intense introspection. Uniting them all is Chabon's utterly distinct prose style--exuberant and graceful, sometimes ironic but never cynical. His work has earned accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to science fiction's Hugo and Nebula Awards. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and other much-admired works. Spanning nearly twenty years and drawn from science fiction fan magazines and literary journals alike, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction, including the importance of dismantling the false divide between literary and lowbrow, his evolving relationship to Jewish culture and literature, the unique properties of male friendship, and the complexities of race in contemporary America. These interviews are essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of the life and work of an author who has been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary American fiction.