Michael Chabon
Список книг автора Michael ChabonMaps and Legends
A collection of essays on books and why they matter by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer of ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’ and ‘The Yiddish Policemen’s Union’.‘Maps and Legends’ is a love song in 16 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 favour of a wide-ranging affection. His own fiction, meanwhile, is explored from the perspective of personal history: post-collegiate desperation sparks his debut, ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’; procrastination and doubt reveal the way toward ‘Wonder Boys’; a love of comics and a basement golem combine to create the Pulitzer Prize-winning ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay’; and an enigmatic Yiddish phrasebook unfurls into ‘The Yiddish Policemen's Union’.
Moonglow
A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK OF THE YEARThe keeping of secrets and the telling of lies; sex and desire and ordinary love; existential doubt and model rocketry – all feature in the new novel from the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.‘The world, like the Tower of Babel or my grandmother’s deck of cards, was made out of stories, and it was always on the verge of collapse.’Moonglow unfolds as a deathbed confession. An old man, his tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, his memory stirred by the imminence of death, tells stories to his grandson, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried. Why did he try to strangle a former business partner with a telephone cord? What was he thinking when he and a buddy set explosives on a bridge in Washington, D.C.? What did he feel while he hunted down Wernher von Braun in Germany? And what did he see in the young girl he met in Baltimore after returning home from the war?From the Jewish slums of pre-war Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of a New York prison, from the heyday of the space programme to the twilight of ‘the American Century’, Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week.
A Model World
In this compelling collection of short stories, bestselling author Michael Chabon explores adolescent desire, love, friendship and fatherhood – moving across this powerful emotional ground with subtlety and incisiveness.Written with wryness, whimsy and intellectual depth, this is a collection of eleven wonderful stories of growing up and growing wise.In ‘S Angel’ a group of wedding guests is hijacked by a fast-talking real estate agent, but not before the bride herself disappears. ‘Smoke’ takes us to a baseball catcher’s funeral, where one of the mourners – a has-been pitcher – confronts the ruins of his career. In the hilarious title story, a graduate student plagiarizes a dissertation on the movement of clouds, only to find himself and his faculty advisor in a parlour game where each player must confess the worst thing he or she has ever done. The second part of the book ‘The Lost World’ is a series of stories about a young boy, Nathan Shapiro, who must face the wrenching emotions caused by his parents’ bitter divorce.Serious, yet shot through with wit, humour and compassion, these are unforgettable stories from one of America’s most celebrated writers.
