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Staff Pick
When Michael Chabon's daughter says intros, prefaces, and forewords are rarely ever digested by leisurely readers, Chabon is baffled. In Bookends, Chabon argues that these often overlooked parts of a book are crucial in its development and placement in our society. Rather than a collection of short stories, this anthology is curated with the idea that the often skipped portion of a work can be a place of connection and conversation. You should have your favorite web search accessible because these fascinating and critical analyses will have you fumbling for their greater parts. Recommended By Alex Y., Powells.com
Pleasure is the overarching theme in this perfectly winsome compilation on reading and writing: Chabon offers insights and meditations on the role literature has played in his life, invoking the written word as the cherishable prize that it is — in ways only he can. Recommended By Lucinda G., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
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 the Author
Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Summerland, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps & Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, Manhood for Amateurs, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, Pops, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.