Discover

Michael Chabon

Personal Information

Born May 24, 1963 (62 years old)
Washington, D.C., United States
Also known as: Chabon, M. Chabon
46 books
3.9 (107)
643 readers

Description

Michael Chabon is an American author. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was published when he was 25. He followed it with a second novel, Wonder Boys (1995), and two short-story collections. In 2000, Chabon published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard, in a 2007 review of a later novel, called 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 that same year. His novel Telegraph Avenue, published in 2012 and billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerns the tangled lives of two families in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the year 2004. Source: Wikipedia

Books

Newest First

Fault lines

0.0 (0)
2

Merritt Fowler is a natural caretaker. Most of her life she has cared for her beautiful, erratic younger sister, Laura; her self-sacrificing physician husband, Pom; and her lovely, fragile sixteen-year-old daughter, Glynn. Now, in this strange summer of unnaturally warm weather and growing pressures, she is caring too for her husband's destructive, controlling mother, who is ill with advanced Alzheimer's disease. Exhausted and confused, Merritt no longer knows quite who she is or what is important to her. She only knows that something deep inside is about to crack. A fierce family quarrel sends Glynn running west from Atlanta to seek sanctuary with her aunt Laura, a fine actress whose promising Hollywood career is in decline. Merritt goes after her daughter - against Pom's wishes and in the face of his anger - and she impulsively decides to stay in California to see if the widening fissures between mother, sister, and daughter can be healed. After a head-on collision with Laura's shallow, seductive Hollywood world and her betraying film director lover, the three women end up in Laura's red Mustang convertible, barreling up the wild coast from the Palm Springs Desert to the Santa Cruz Mountains outside San Francisco - earthquake country. In a borrowed lodge among the great redwoods, they finally stop to confront one another and their own demons.

Nothing But You

0.0 (0)
3

"Love becomes life," Roger Angell proposes in his Introduction to Nothing But You: Love Stories from The New Yorker, and the variety of his meticulous and generous selection - thirty-eight stories, the first anthology of New Yorker fiction in three decades - proves his point. With pleasure, sadness, yearning, and dismay, we follow these subtle and surprising investigators of ourselves in love, from the seizures of erotic passion to the revisited depths of romantic despair. Taken separately, these stories suggest the infinite variety of the human heart. Taken together, they are a literary milestone, a comprehensive review of the way we live and love now.

Escape

3.0 (1)
21

Paris, 1870. Excessively handsome and exceedingly wealthy, Lord Thornton Kyleston, the Earl of Kyleston faced two mighty dangers. In England, the beautiful and determined Lady Irene Curtis impatiently awaited his return, while in Paris, the winds of war were inexorably rising. In the midst of his dilemma, the Earl acquired a startling protegee: an enchanting young Lady, Miranda Valmont, with a most unladylike proposal....

Moonglow

4.3 (3)
0

When Tracy went to Atlanta, it was to cover the Olympics for the Associated press-not to report on the kidnapping of a well-known socialite. But after the disappearance of Jackie DeRidder, wife of a major benefactor to the Olympic Games, that's exactly what she finds herself doing.

Fight of the Century

4.0 (2)
11

To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman to bring together many of our greatest living writers, each contributing an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. On January 19, 1920, a small group of idealists and visionaries, including Helen Keller, Jane Addams, Roger Baldwin, and Crystal Eastman, founded the American Civil Liberties Union. A century after its creation, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. In collaboration with the ACLU, authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman have curated an anthology of essays about landmark cases in the organization's one-hundred-year history. Fight of the Century takes you inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some of the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in--Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade, Miranda v. Arizona--need little introduction. Others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. Familiar or little-known, each case springs to vivid life in the hands of the acclaimed writers who dive into the history, narrate their personal experiences, and debate the questions at the heart of each issue. Hector Tobar introduces us to Ernesto Miranda, the felon whose wrongful conviction inspired the now-iconic Miranda rights--which the police would later read to the man suspected of killing him. Yaa Gyasi confronts the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education, in which the ACLU submitted a friend of- the-court brief questioning why a nation that has sent men to the moon still has public schools so unequal that they may as well be on different planets. True to the ACLU's spirit of principled dissent, Scott Turow offers a blistering critique of the ACLU's stance on campaign finance. These powerful stories, along with essays from Neil Gaiman, Meg Wolitzer, Salman Rushdie, Ann Patchett, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Louise Erdrich, George Saunders, and many more, remind us that the issues the ACLU has engaged over the past one hundred years remain as vital as ever today, and that we can never take our liberties for granted. Chabon and Waldman are donating their advance to the ACLU and the contributors are forgoing payment. To mark its 100-year anniversary, the American Civil Liberties Union asked authors to contribute an original piece inspired by a historic ACLU case. Since its founding on January 19, 1920, the ACLU remains the nation's premier defender of the rights and freedoms guaranteed by the Constitution. This collection takes readers inside the trials and the stories that have shaped modern life. Some are the most prominent cases that the ACLU has been involved in; others you may never even have heard of, yet their outcomes quietly defined the world we live in now. -- adapted from jacket

The Best American Short Stories 2005

0.0 (0)
1

"In "Until Gwen," Dennis Lehane offers a narrative experiment and a haunting picture of a father and son. Tom Perrotta's "The Smile on Happy Chang's Face" explores a Little League umpire's attempt to cope with his biggest personal regret and the inability to make a decisive call on the field. Thomas McGuane's "Old Friends" examines the intersection of shared history and obligation, while Joyce Carol Oates meditates on the inescapable bonds of family in "Cousins." In "Stone Animals," Kelly Link takes a chilling look at a family spiraling beyond control in the surreal landscape of their new home. By turns humorous, poignant, and profound, the stories of 2005 add up to an eclectic installment of this anthology."--Jacket.

Bookends

0.0 (0)
0

"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 profound: "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."-- The introductions and afterwords of books are often overlooked by readers but Chabon often finds them to be treasures: transitive acts of seduction. He explains how they can be explanatory, triumphal, bibliographic-- even score-settling. His compilation of pieces about books gives readers a unique look into Chabon's literary origins and influences: the literature that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading. -- adapted from introduction and back cover.

A model world and other stories

3.0 (1)
4

A collection of short stories includes "A Model World", "Millionaires", and a series of tales about a young boy experiencing the pain of his parents' imminent divorce.

Werewolves in their youth

0.0 (0)
9

Le divorce, l'abandon et la nostalgie sont au coeur des neufs nouvelles qui composent ce recueil, excepté la dernière qui fait un clin d'oeil à la "pulp fiction". L'auteur choisit le ton de la comédie et de l'ironie mordante pour ces récits.