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The Pulitzer Prize-winning author— "an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times)—offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.

A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past.

What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as—simply because—it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood, of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, as a theme played—on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key—by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor.

At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic.

His wife, Ayelet Waldman, having declared herself a Bad Mother, novelist Chabon feels free to offer linked essays on being a father, husband, and son. I'll read anything he writes. With an 11-city tour; 200,000-copy first printing. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

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This collection of previously published essays by the author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is both lyrical and side-splittingly funny. In each autobiographical composition, the self-deprecating Chabon reveals facets of his ongoing evolution into "manhood." His most resonant role, as father, finds him reviling the "provided solutions" and "pre-imagined environments" of contemporary toys and advocating that children "mock capitalism and the uses to which it seeks to put them." Chabon also notes the infrequency with which today's kids are left to their own devices; there is "no space…free of adult supervision, adult mediation, adult control" so that kids can, as did he, simply ride bikes or mess around. The writing makes epic the mundane, such as his teenaged adventure leading his young brother across an unfamiliar cityscape, or a rant on "crap" that manages to both skewer and celebrate pop culture past (Planet of the Apes TV series) and present ("family movies"). VERDICT Readers seeking the intelligence of Updike; the gentle, brainy appeal of Sedaris; or the literary virtuosity of Nabokov will thoroughly enjoy what the publisher bills as Chabon's first major nonfiction work. [See Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/09.]—Douglas C. Lord, Connecticut State Lib., Hartford

[Page 97]. Copyright 2008 Reed Business Information.

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An entertaining omnibus of opinionated essays previously published mostly in Details magazine spotlights novelist Chabon's (The Yiddish Policemen's Union) model of being an attentive, honest father and a fairly observant Jew. Living in Berkeley, Calif., raising four children with his wife, Ayelet Waldman, who has also just published a collection of parenting stories (Bad Mother), Chabon, at 45, revisits his own years growing up in the 1970s with a mixture of rue and relief. A child of the suburbs of Maryland and elsewhere, where children could still play in what he calls in one essay the "Wilderness of Childhood," he enjoyed a freedom now lost to kids, endured the divorce of his parents, smoked a lot of pot, suffered a short early marriage and finally found his life's partner, who takes risks where he won't. The essays are tidily arranged around themes of manly affection (his first father-in-law, his younger brother); "styles of manhood," such as faking at being a handyman; and "patterns of early enchantment," such as his delight in comic books, sci-fi and stargazing. Candid, warm and humorous, Chabon's essays display his habitual attention to craft. (Oct.)

[Page 131]. Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.