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Overview
Maps and Legends is an essay collection by American author Michael Chabon that was scheduled for official release on May 1, 2008, although some copies shipped two weeks early from various online bookstores. The book is Chabon's first book-length foray into nonfiction, with 16 essays, some previously published.[1] Several of these essays are defenses of the author's work in genre literature (such as science fiction, fantasy, and comics), while others are more autobiographical, explaining how the author came to write several of his most popular works.
Synopsis
Michael Chabon's sparkling first book of nonfiction is a love song in 16 parts — a series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection. His own fiction, meanwhile, is explored from the perspective of personal history: post-collegiate desperation sparks his debut, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; procrastination and doubt reveal the way toward Wonder Boys; a love of comics and a basement golem combine to create the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; and an enigmatic Yiddish phrasebook unfurls into The Yiddish Policeman's Union.
The Barnes & Noble Review
In whimsical, ruminatively leaping essays, one of the Bay Area s favorite wonder boys expounds upon his fascinations: golems, comic books, Kabbalah, Sherlock Holmes, genre fiction, and the early 1970s. In the process, Chabon both presents and defends the specificities of his life s imaginative terrains, the eclectic ingredients he s used to make his own literature, and the literary pathways he traveled to become a writer. Probably not just anyone could have had an early-'70s East Coast Jewish childhood and then, living in Oakland at the age of 25, crossed The Great Gatsby with Goodbye, Columbus to come up with Mysteries of Pittsburgh. But in the process of exploring where he s from, Chabon is also offering an object lesson: Excavating ways that pay attention to particular passions, defending childhood loves, and preserving one s own internal dialects are fertile terrains for making art. Chabon s prose is rambunctious and even supercharged: He s got a wonderful, digressive etymolygy of the word "entertain" as having to do with host and guest, performer and audience, twined in mutual suspension. For the most part, Chabon masters his own tightrope and ropes us in. If at times his expository gallivanting waxes precious or thin, Chabon also provides a generous working model. He argues that in making space for your own specificities and literary loves, you (the general, art-making you) have a chance to chart your place and time s unique voice in literature. If you re lucky, the addition of your loves may increase the sum of ways we (the general reading us) can mean and feel and know ourselves. That would be, Chabon argues, a triumph indeed. --Tess Taylor
Editorials
Publishers Weekly
You would hardly think, reading Chabon's new book of essays, that he won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about comics. Rather, he is bitter and defensive about his love for genre fiction such as mysteries and comic books. Serious writers, he says, cannot venture into these genres without losing credibility. "No self-respecting literary genius... would ever describe him- or herself as primarily an 'entertainer,' " Chabon writes. "An entertainer is a man in a sequined dinner jacket, singing 'She's a Lady' to a hall filled with women rubber-banding their underwear up onto the stage." Chabon devotes most of the essays to examining specific genres that he admires, from M.R. James's ghost stories to Cormac McCarthy's apocalyptic work, The Road.The remaining handful of essays are more memoir-focused, with Chabon explaining how he came to write many of his books. Chabon casts himself as one of the few brave souls willing to face ridicule-from whom isn't entirely clear, though it seems to be academics-to write as he wishes. "I write from the place I live: in exile," he says. It's hard to imagine the audience for this book. Chabon seems to want to debate English professors, but surely only his fellow comic-book lovers will be interested in his tirade. (Apr.)
Copyright 2007 Reed Business InformationLibrary Journal
In his first work of nonfiction, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay) tells readers of some of the books that have helped shape his writing career. Among his loves: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and various comic strips and ghost stories. Chabon argues that there's a place for both high and low art in literature and that what really makes a reader is a love for the story. Chabon's 16 essays are seemingly organized from the least personal ("Trickster in a Suit of Lights, Thoughts on the Modern Short Story") to the most personal ("Golems I Have Known; Or, Why My Elder Son's Middle Name Is Napoleon") and argue the merits of reading, writing, and storytelling, breaking down the barriers between so-called genre writing and "serious" literature. Affectionate and funny; a welcome and necessary addition to all collections.
—Pam Kingsbury