About this book
A brilliant, idiosyncratic collection of introductions and afterwords (plus some liner notes) by New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon—“one of contemporary literature’s most gifted prose stylists” (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). 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.
About Michael Chabon
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
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