American · b. 1963
Michael Chabon is a Pulitzer Prize–winning American novelist celebrated for his exuberant, allusive prose and genre-blending imagination, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Wonder Boys, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union.
Michael Chabon announced his talent with the precocious debut The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and confirmed it with Wonder Boys, but it was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000), a sweeping novel about comic-book creators in mid-century New York, that won the Pulitzer Prize and established him as one of the leading novelists of his generation.
Chabon is celebrated for his dazzling, maximalist prose and his joyful blurring of literary and genre fiction — detective story, alternate history, adventure, and comic-book lore all feed his work, as in the noir-inflected alternate history The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and the big-hearted Oakland novel Telegraph Avenue. His exuberant verbal energy can tip into excess, but at its best his writing is among the most pleasurable in contemporary American fiction.
A prolific essayist and screenwriter as well, Chabon is admired for his celebration of storytelling itself and his refusal of the boundary between high and popular art.
by Michael Chabon
Two Jewish cousins — a Czech refugee with Houdini-level escape artistry and a Brooklyn teenager with a gift for business — create one of the golden age of comics' most enduring superheroes, The Escapist, while navigating World War II, love, loss, and the American immigrant experience. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize.
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by Michael Chabon
In an alternative history, Jewish refugees settled in Sitka, Alaska after World War II instead of Palestine. Now the Federal District of Sitka is about to revert to Alaskan jurisdiction, and detective Meyer Landsman has a body in his hotel room and a chess piece near the corpse. A genre novel that is also a meditation on home, diaspora, and the limits of belonging.
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by Michael Chabon
Grady Tripp, a creative writing professor at a Pittsburgh university, has been working on his second novel for seven years. It is 2,600 pages and shows no signs of ending. Over one chaotic weekend — during a literary festival — everything in his life comes apart at once: his wife leaves, his editor arrives, his student steals a jacket from the chancellor's house.
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by Michael Chabon
Michael Chabon's big-hearted novel of Oakland. Two friends, one Black and one white, run a beloved used-record store threatened by a new megastore, while their wives work as midwives and their families' secret histories surface — a maximalist comedy of race, friendship, music, and place.
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