In 1966, when The Crying of Lot 49 was published, Pynchon’s “all-ecompassing paranoiac vision of history” seemed “so kooky” and “far-fetched.” Fast forward to 2013, and Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, a novel focused on events before, during, and after 9/11 “becomes not just an ideal but a compulsory subject for a late Pynchon novel,” as Michael […]
...moreIn a sort of Bay Area meeting of minds, Scott Hutchins, author of a novel about San Francisco and Silicon Valley, profiles Michael Chabon, whose latest novel takes place mainly in Oakland and Berkeley. Read it to learn about Chabon’s love for the East Bay, his similarities to Charles Dickens, and Telegraph Avenue‘s beginnings as a […]
...moreMichael Chabon knows how to turn a phrase. Complex language is part of what makes his work so idiosyncratically his and his veteran wordsmith tendencies are widely applicable and translatable over different mediums (he’s co-writing an HBO series with his wife, Ayelet Waldman). Yesterday was the release date for his children’s book, The Astonishing Secret […]
...moreVeteran director, Darren Aronofsky, is directing a new television series called “Hobgoblin.” How is this piece of news relevant to the literary community? Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman are writing the pilot, swept up in the TV magnetism that has attracted more and more seasoned writers as of late. The pilot is about magicians and […]
...moreA new article over at Mother Jones gives us summer nonfiction picks from some of the biggest writers working today. Susan Orlean recommends The Looming Tower, Jennifer Egan selects The Image, and Michael Chabon has this to say about The Encyclopedia of Fantasy: “A single, immense, thrilling work of literary theory disguised as a reference […]
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“I don’t go down wrong paths; I’d rather stare at the screen and delete until I’ve put something down that is working.”
...moreIn a recent article in the New York Review of Books, Michael Chabon laments the loss of a sense of adventure in childhood. “If children are not permitted—not taught—to be adventurers and explorers as children,” he said, “What will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?” But Sergei Lobanov-Rostovsky at The Kenyon […]
...more“We have this idea of armchair traveling, of the reader who seeks in the pages of a ripping yarn or a memoir of polar exploration the kind of heroism and danger, in unknown, half-legendary lands, that he or she could never hope to find in life. This is a mistaken notion, in my view. People […]
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