Michael Chabon
All Books By Michael Chabon
Awesome Man: The Mystery Intruder
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 minutes
- Publisher: Quill Tree Books
- Publish date: September 29, 2020
- Language: English
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3.6(68 ratings)
Awesome Man, our favorite superhero, is back, and in this fantastic sequel from New York Times bestselling author Michael Chabon, he must prepare for his greatest threat yet!
Awesome Man’s secret identity has stayed safe, and he’s still the coolest superhero around. He loves protecting the people of Awesome City from evildoers, like the giant Plutonian octolizard, with his trusty sidekick, Moskowitz. But there have been reports that a new hero is coming to town soon. What if the people of Awesome City no longer need Awesome Man?
Narrated by the author, this audiobook is a great gift for the superhero-obsessed and any kid adjusting to life with a new sibling!
... Read moreBookends
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael Chabon
- Length: 4 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: January 22, 2019
- Language: English
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3.37(161 ratings)
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.
... Read moreFight of the Century
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: an All Star Cast
- Length: 11 hours 2 minutes
- Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
- Publish date: January 01, 2020
- Language: English
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4.22(1139 ratings)
The American Civil Liberties Union partners with award-winning authors Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman in this “forceful, beautifully written” (Associated Press) collection that brings 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 “full of struggle, emotion, fear, resilience, hope, and triumph” (Los Angeles Review of Books) 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.
Gentlemen of the Road
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Andre Braugher
- Length: 4 hours 13 minutes
- Publisher: Penguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
- Publish date: January 01, 2007
- Language: English
#1 SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE
“A picaresque, swashbuckling adventure.”—The Washington Post Book World
They’re an odd pair, to be sure: pale, rail-thin, black-clad Zelikman, a moody, itinerant physician fond of jaunty headgear, and ex-soldier Amram, a gray-haired giant of a man as quick with a razor-tongued witticism as with a sharpened battle-ax. Brothers under the skin, comrades in arms, they make their rootless way through the Caucasus Mountains, circa a.d. 950, living as they please and surviving however they can—as blades and thieves for hire and as practiced bamboozlers, cheerfully separating the gullible from their money. But when they are dragooned into service as escorts and defenders to a prince of the Khazar Empire, they soon find themselves the half-willing generals in a full-scale revolution—on a road paved with warriors and whores, evil emperors and extraordinary elephants, secrets, swordplay, and such stuff as the grandest adventures are made of.
Praise for Gentlemen of the Road
“Within a few pages I was happily tangled in [Chabon’s] net of finely filigreed language, seduced by an old-school-style swashbuckling quest . . . laced with surprises and humor.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“[Chabon] is probably the premiere prose stylist—the Updike—of his generation.”—Time
“The action is intricate and exuberant. . . . It’s hard to resist its gathering momentum, not to mention the sheer headlong pleasure of Chabon’s language.”—The New York Times Book Review
“[A] wild, wild adventure . . . abounds with lush language . . . This book roars to be read aloud.”—Chicago Sun-Times
Kingdom of Olives and Ash
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Fred Sanders
- Length: 16 hours 4 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: May 30, 2017
- Language: English
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4.26(245 ratings)
A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of fifty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.
In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today’s most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence–an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there–and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories.
Kingdom of Olives and Ash includes contributions from several of today’s most esteemed storytellers including: Colum McCann, Jacqueline Woodson, Colm Toibin, Geraldine Brooks, Dave Eggers, Hari Kunzru, Raja Shehadeh, Mario Vargas Llosa and Assaf Gavron, as well as from editors Chabon and Waldman. Through these incisive, perceptive, and poignant essays, readers will gain unique insight into the narratives behind the litany of grim destruction broadcasted nightly on the news, as well as deeper understanding of the conflict as experienced by the people who live in the occupied territories. Together, these stories stand witness to the human cost of the occupation.
... Read moreManhood for Amateurs
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 hours 3 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: October 06, 2009
- Language: English
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3.73(7080 ratings)
“Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving’s inventive sleight of hand. . . . As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality.”
— Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
“Wondrous, wise and beautiful.”
— David Kamp, New York Times Book Review
The bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Werewolves in Their Youth, Wonderboys, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Michael Chabon “takes [his] brutally observant, unfailingly honest, marvelously human gaze and turns it on his own life” (Time) in the New York Times bestselling memoir Manhood for Amateurs.
... Read moreMoonglow
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: George Newbern
- Length: 14 hours 42 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: November 22, 2016
- Language: English
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3.81(25480 ratings)
Following on the heels of his New York Times-bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure–and the forces that work to destroy us.
In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis of the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.
Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact–and the creative power–of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.
From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.
... Read morePops
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael Chabon
- Length: 2 hours 16 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: May 15, 2018
- Language: English
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3.72(2535 ratings)
“Magical prose stylist” Michael Chabon (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) delivers a collection of essays–heartfelt, humorous, insightful, wise–on the meaning of fatherhood.
For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then thirteen, to Paris Men’s Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at “thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermes neckties,” sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time. Despite his own indifference, however, what gradually emerged as Chabon ferried his son to and from fashion shows was a deep respect for his son’s passion. The piece quickly became a viral sensation.
With the GQ story as its centerpiece, and featuring six additional essays plus an introduction, Pops illuminates the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood as only Michael Chabon can.
... Read moreSummerland
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael Chabon
- Length: 15 hours 28 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: April 12, 2016
- Language: English
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3.56(10378 ratings)
From the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Chabon comes this bestselling novel for readers of all ages that blends fantasy and folklore with that most American coming-of-age ritual: baseball–now in a new edition, with an original introduction by the author.
Ethan Feld is having a terrible summer: his father has moved them to Clam Island, Washington, where Ethan has quickly established himself as the least gifted baseball player the island has ever seen. Ethan’s luck begins to change, however, when a mysterious baseball scout named Ringfinger Brown and a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-year-old werefox enter his life, dragging Ethan into another world called the Summerlands. But this beautiful, winter-less place is facing destruction at the hands of the villainous Coyote, and it has been prophesized that only Ethan can save it.
In this cherished modern classic, the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning author brings his masterful storytelling, dexterous plotting, and singularly envisioned characters to a coming-of-age novel for readers of all ages.
... Read moreTelegraph Avenue
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Clarke Peters
- Length: 18 hours 39 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: September 11, 2012
- Language: English
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3.39(18260 ratings)
“An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist.”
–Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture–Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music–and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.
... Read moreThe Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Marc Thompson
- Length: 6 minutes
- Publisher: HarperCollins
- Publish date: September 06, 2011
- Language: English
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3.74(1041 ratings)
Awesome Man can shoot positronic rays out of his eyeballs, fly as straight asan arrow, and hug mutant Jell-O! Even villains like Professor Von Evil and the Flaming Eyeball are no match for this caped crusader.
But Awesome Man also has a secret. . . . Can you guess what it is?
The first picture book from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon perfectly captures the fantasy life of young superhero fans.
... Read moreThe Final Solution
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Michael York
- Length: 3 hours 20 minutes
- Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
- Publish date: January 01, 2017
- Language: English
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3.35(16274 ratings)
Retired to the English countryside, an eighty-nine-year-old man, rumored to be a once-famous detective, is more concerned with his beekeeping than with his fellow man. Into his life wanders Linus Steinman, nine years old and mute, who has escaped from Nazi Germany with his sole companion: an African gray parrot.
What is the meaning of the mysterious strings of German numbers the bird spews out–a top-secret SS code? The keys to a series of Swiss bank accounts? Or do they hold a significance both more prosaic and far more sinister?
Though the solution may be beyond even the reach of the once-famous sleuth, the true story of the boy and his parrot is subtly revealed in a wrenching resolution.
... Read moreThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh
- By: Michael Chabon
- Length: 8 hours 13 minutes
- Publisher: Tantor Media, Inc
- Publish date: April 03, 2018
- Language: English
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3.64(27080 ratings)
Michael Chabon masterfully renders the funny, tender, and captivating first-person narrative of Art Bechstein, whose confusion and heartache echo the tones of literary forebears like The Catcher in the Rye’s Holden Caulfield and The Great Gatsby’s Nick Carraway.
The Mysteries of Pittsburgh incontrovertibly established Chabon as a powerful force in contemporary fiction, even before his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay set the literary world spinning. An unforgettable story of coming of age in America, it is also an essential milestone in the movement of American fiction, from a novelist who has become one of the most important and enduring voices of this generation.
The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
- By: Michael Chabon
- Narrator: Peter Riegert
- Length: 12 hours 37 minutes
- Publisher: HarperAudio
- Publish date: July 05, 2016
- Language: English
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3.71(65668 ratings)
he New York Times bestseller, now available in paperback–“an excellent, hyperliterate, genre-pantsing detective novel that deserves every inch of its…blockbuster superfame” (New York).
For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a “temporary” safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.
Homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. And in the cheap hotel where Landsman has washed up, someone has just committed a murder–right under his nose. When he begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy, word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, and Landsman finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, evil, and salvation that are his heritage.
At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.
... Read more