Michael ChabonCríticas

Four stars only because it's not 100 percent my kind of perfect book. Everything else about it is five stars. The story, the subject matter, the writing are all worthy of the Pulitzer that it won. One tiny thought is that the giant fancy words he likes to use kept making me stop to look them up, which kind of broke the magical spell of reading. But i guess if you're writing about comic books you have to balance out the subject matter with a big cerebral vocabulary.

In Borges' prologue to The Invention of Morel he wrote about the critical scorn for "the adventure story" which could supposedly afford only "nonexistent or puerile" pleasure to readers. "This was undoubtedly the prevailing opinion in 1880, 1925, and even 1940" (Morel, 5). Michael Chabon seems convinced that the prejudice is still in full effect in 2002. Yet this Thrilling Tales volume he edited for McSweeny's was sufficiently well-received to be reissued as "A Vintage Contemporaries Original" and kept in print thus for decades.

The book contains a wide variety of stories, many of them by authors who have previously held my attention. Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium" had something of the darkly comic vernacular feel of the "David Wong" books by Jason Pargin. "Closing Time" was one of the better Neal Gaiman short stories I've read, and it reminded me a little bit of Arthur Machen. I was entirely unfamiliar with Carol Emshwiller, but her story "The General" was a standout contribution.

Michael Moorcock's piece was a motive for me to pick up the book. It seemed like a mere Sexton Blake pastiche when I first read it, but later I saw how it fit into his Second Ether continuity developed in Fabulous Harbours. That book has its own Sexton Begg (sic) story "Crimson Eyes," set in a London of "the recent future."

The book includes two novellas, the first of which is Dave Eggers' "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly." Like some other stories in this volume, this one showed that an adventure story could be achieved with an exotic setting, while retaining a "literary" focus on character and personal history, and without necessarily becoming plot-forward.

The longest story of the book is Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes," a Phildickian compound of shifting realities, memory, and drug abuse, set in a near-future New York City where a dirty bomb has killed half of the population. It has a healthy dose of mise en abyme and epistemological tension to spare. I liked it very much.

Chabon's own contribution is at the end of the book. It is a steampunk tale set in an 1876 America where the 1776 revolution had failed. Framed as the first chapter of a serial, it promises its next installment in McSweeny's Second Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales. But as far as I've been able to find out, no such volume has yet appeared, nor has "The Martian Agent" been continued.

Howard Chaykin was a great pick for an illustrator. He supplied title-page graphics for all the stories except for Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That," which has a full-page illustration by Kent Bash.

Read on audio. Chabon put together a collection of various Introductions and Outroductions and Liner Notes that he's written over the years. I usually don't read these, but in this case it was very interesting to get a sense of both him and the various books he was introducing. Not many of which, I have read. From a coffee table book about Wes Anderson, to several graphic novels, Michael Moorcock, Ray Bradbury and several of his books. For the Michael Chabon completist, its a worthy read.

Not my favorite Chabon novel, in fact, it didn't really feel like a Chabon novel compared to the others that I've read and loved. Still had some lovely writing, but I just didn't connect to it in the way I did Kavalier & Clay or The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

A quick paced, funny, distressing and ultimately charming adventure.

I liked 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay', but this was not my cup of tea. In general, the writing was good and the premise was interesting, but the characters were more sad than interesting. I did find the continual use of footnotes to be quite distracting. Not sure why some of the text was included as footnotes, it is not like it was not part of the main narrative.

The fact that this was a work of fiction somewhat raised the bar on what I expected from a story. This felt artificially disjointed and I had a hard time caring about any of the characters except the narrator. I reached a point where I felt like this was not what I wanted to be thinking about so I put it aside.

I really enjoyed this book, which is ultimately about all the ways people can be trashed and the ways to escape. It is imaginative and heartfelt, with well-developed characters. Ostensibly the story of two cousins who create a comic book superhero around the time of World War II, it touches on magic, religion, mythology, all the various types of love, friendship and personal fulfillment that can be found if you look hard enough and are brave. A caveat to dog lovers, you might want to skip the polar section, you'll thank me

A little over written in places and a little too long at the house for Passover but a great read with plenty of metaphor and trope. Sometimes a little too glib. I enjoyed the movie and the characters and film was in mind when I read the novel. The story was different enough and the ending pulled it up from a 4 to a 4.5. One of the few truly great endings read in the last months.½

Stop me, oh oh oh, stop me, stop me if you think that you've heard this one before - an old man on his deathbed tells the story of his life in time hopping fragments. His mad wife tormented by the Skinless Horse was more interesting to me, with the huge deception buried in her past - Oh, who said she lied, because she never, she never, who said she'd lied because she never?

This is the first book written by Chabon that I've read.

(2007)(audio)Pretty good alternate universe novel about a detective in Sitka where the Jews were settled in 1948. A resident in his apartment house is murdered and he is dragged against his will into investigating this. He is not very anxious to do this as the Jew's homeland will revert to Alaska in a couple of months and then the occupants will be scattered to the winds. Turns out that the murdered man is viewed by many as the ?messiah? and was going to be used in a scheme to return to the Holy Land. I had to listen to audio book because I couldn't read this due to the yiddish idioms and numerous characters used.From Publishers Weekly[Signature]Reviewed by Jess WalterThey are the "frozen Chosen," two million people living, dying and kvetching in Sitka, Alaska, the temporary homeland established for displaced World War II Jews in Chabon's ambitious and entertaining new novel. It is¥deep breath nowÂ¥a murder-mystery speculative-history Jewish-identity noir chess thriller, so perhaps it's no surprise that, in the back half of the book, the moving parts become unwieldy; Chabon is juggling narrative chainsaws here.The novel beginsÂ¥the same way that Philip Roth launched The Plot Against AmericaÂ¥with a fascinating historical footnote: what if, as Franklin Roosevelt proposed on the eve of World War II, a temporary Jewish settlement had been established on the Alaska panhandle? Roosevelt's plan went nowhere, but Chabon runs the idea into the present, back-loading his tale with a haunting history. Israel failed to get a foothold in the Middle East, and since the Sitka solution was only temporary, Alaskan Jews are about to lose their cold homeland. The book's timeless refrain: "It's a strange time to be a Jew."Into this world arrives Chabon's Chandler-ready hero, Meyer Landsman, a drunken rogue cop who wakes in a flophouse to find that one of his neighbors has been murdered. With his half-Tlingit, half-Jewish partner and his sexy-tough boss, who happens also to be his ex-wife, Landsman investigates a fascinating underworld of Orthodox black-hat gangs and crime-lord rabbis. Chabon's "Alyeska" is an act of fearless imagination, more evidence of the soaring talent of his previous genre-blender, the Pulitzer Prize?winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.Eventually, however, Chabon's homage to noir feels heavy-handed, with too many scenes of snappy tough-guy banter and too much of the kind of elaborate thriller plotting that requires long explanations and offscreen conspiracies.Chabon can certainly write noirÂ¥or whatever else he wants; his recent Sherlock Holmes novel, The Final Solution, was lovely, even if the New York Times Book Review sniffed its surprise that the mystery novel would "appeal to the real writer." Should any other snobs mistake Chabon for anything less than a real writer, this book offers new evidence of his peerless storytelling and style. Characters have skin "as pale as a page of commentary" and rough voices "like an onion rolling in a bucket." It's a solid performance that would have been even better with a little more Yiddish and a little less police.

A memoir of sorts. I haven't read that much non-fiction by Chabon and this was quite enjoyable. He's revealing without being repulsive (largely).

This book juggles so many concepts at once it's hard to get mad at it when it drops some balls at the end. Although this is an alternate history it's no Harry Turtledove macro big-picture deal. The majority of the book is focused on the small and personal scale, to its advantage. The book is at its best when constructing its alien but entirely familiar Sitka Alaska, juxtaposing historical and cultural ephemera for a punchline, fleshing out both its living and dead characters and their universally shared experiences of loss, and saturating the world with a hardened melancholy that feels appropriate to both Alaskan lumberjacks and dispossessed Jews. I have a lot of thoughts about this book but I think the best and most concise thing I can say is that I found myself wanting to visit the fictional city in between chapters.

Loved this short story.

I loved this one! It's right up there with The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay as my favorite Chabon novels. I really want to go out and buy a record player and some records now.

It was pretty good for a children's book.

I'm sad now. I don't have any more Chabon books to read until he writes something new. :/

My least favorite of his books so far. Maybe it was just being in training at the time that ruined it for me?

Some writers of fiction tell stories; others construct intricate worlds. Michael Chabon is the second kind of writer, and I'm so glad I've finally gotten around to his work.

On its face, this is a high-concept book: Sammy Clay is an idealistic nobody from Brooklyn; Joe Kavalier, his cousin, is a Jewish refugee from Nazi Prague; together they accidentally strike it rich as a writer-illustrator team during the Golden Age of superhero comics.

But in Chabon's hands, the story of their partnership is much bigger than its premise: a jumping-off point for a meditation on suburban American identity, an examination of the uses of "escapist" fiction, a surrealist fable about the Holocaust, a feminist and queer reading of superheroes*, a study of grief and survival. And yes, embedded in the novel are some thrilling metafictional superhero stories, if that is your wheelhouse (as it is mine).

It's a deft magic trick of a novel, and it succeeds for two reasons. Chabon is an immensely gifted writer; there are some lovely, heartbreaking passages in this book that are now imprinted on my brain. And he is very, very good at writing characters. Joe, Sammy, and Rosa are rather understated characters and it would have easy for their personalities to get lost in the sweeping epic of this story, but Chabon always returns to the characters in private and surprising moments.

And DAMN, I think the last page of this novel is one of the best endings I've ever read. Like, WOWSERS.

*Just as I was lamenting the lack of female characters, Chabon introduced Rosa, PLUS a fabulous yet problematic lady superhero with a librarian secret identity. Women readers (and librarians), Michael Chabon has your back!

I liked the premise, the atmosphere, the alternative universe itself, the little details thrown in everywhere. Unfortunately, I did not care much for either the plot or the characters (Bina was cool, though). The prose was rather too flowery for my taste (too many metaphors per square meter), which made it difficult for me to focus on the text. Perhaps I also did the book a disservice by listening to it. Those gruff narrator voices in noir movies are all very well, but they do get tiresome after 12 hours (not in a row, but still...).

This is a story of Coyote and his ultimate defeat. At least his defeat this time. A lovely blend of Norse and Native American mythology, shaped into their own story to bring the world of the Fay to our world. It has much to do with baseball, and revels in the details of description and plot. The main hero crew, three children and the various characters they meet, are interesting and up to the challenge of Coyote, whether they know it or not.½

3.5, some parts beautiful, some contrived. There was a lot that reminded me of my own family story, and perhaps that is also why I feel reserved in my praise for the book.

I'm more than twenty years late to the party for Michael Chabon's hefty novel about the origins and heyday of comic books. THE AMAZING ADVENTURES OF KAVALIER & CLAY won him the Pulitzer, and well-deserved for such a dense, ambitious project about two dissimilar friends (and cousins) who created a memorial superhero for the comics in "The Escapist." They are Jewish, of course, as Chabon's characters usually are, and this is especially important as the story begins before the U.S. enters WWII, and continues through the war years and into the post-war Eisenhower years. So the tragedy of the Holocaust looms large in the background. It is also very much about male friendships and homophobia, another frequent theme in Chabon's fiction. (This is my fourth Chanon.) The book has already been read and reviewed thousands of times, so I will pretty much stop here, although I should probably confess that I almost gave up on it a few times in the first three hundred pages, as it seemed to drag here and there. But once I passed that halfway point (in its six hundred-plus pages), it suddenly picked up speed and began rolling downhill like a runway train. Enuf said. Good book, Mr Chabon. Very highly recommended.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

This is one of the funniest, weirdest, most pot-soaked picaresque adventure novels of academia I have read in ages. Others have said about it - "beautiful and very funny" ... "an exuberant, laugh-a-page barn-burner ... strongly sexual and darkly absurd" ... "captures ... the shame and terror of authorship" ... "flawlessly crafted" ... "A fabulous romp" ... and "reading the book is a joy." Indeed. All of that and more!

WONDER BOYS (1995) was Michael Chabon's second novel. I read his first one, MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, years ago and loved it. After reading this one, it's clear there was no "sophomore slump" for Chabon, but he is obviously poking fun at that concept, but in a compassionate sort of way, because you can't help but feel some pity for his happless writer protagonist, Grady Tripp, whose current novel has stalled at over 1,200 pages and seven years in.

since WONDER BOYS has already been reviewed a couple thousand times, I feel no need to summarize it. I will say I was reminded of John Barth's early novel of academia, THE END OF THE ROAD, and also Bernard Malamud's A NEW LIFE (a personal favorite). But this one is longer, much funnier - and in a category all its own. I loved reading it. My very highest recommendation.

- Tim Bazzett, author of the memoir, BOOKLOVER

I've only read one other book by Michael Chabon ([b:The Yiddish Policemen's Union|16703|The Yiddish Policemen's Union|Michael Chabon|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1178032098s/16703.jpg|95855]), but I will definitely be reading more. And I'll probably be revisiting this one.

He's won a Pulitzer prize, but he has a unique way of crossing from that supposedly more literary world into the realms of what is usually referred to as 'genre' (mysteries, science fiction, comics, and pulp). This collection of essays, as the title suggests, provides a sort of map between his two worlds. They are eloquent ruminations on not only his own life and background and work, but also the works of others (his insights into Cormac McArthy's [b:The Road|350540|The Road|Cormac McCarthy|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1233151881s/350540.jpg|3355573] by themselves make this book worth investigating).

This volume is (as others have pointed out), a 'defense of genre fiction'.