| Michael
Chabon was born in 1963, in Washington, D.C. and raised mostly
in Columbia, a planned city with utopian aspirations in the
Maryland tobacco country. He studied at Carnegie-Mellon and
the University of Pittsburgh, received an M.F.A. in Creative
Writing at UC Irvine, and has spent most of the past two decades
in California, with brief sojourns in Washington State, Florida,
and New York State. Since 1997, he has been living with his
wife, Ayelet Waldman, also a novelist, and their children, in
Berkeley.
Michael Chabon’s first novel, The
Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988), was originally written for
his master’s thesis at U.C. Irvine and became a New York
Times bestseller. Chabon’s second novel, Wonder
Boys (1995), was also a bestseller, and was made into a
critically-acclaimed film featuring actors Michael Douglas and
Tobey Maguire. Michael Chabon believes that three things are
required for success as a novelist: talent, luck, and discipline.
As he says, “Discipline is the one element of those three
things that you can control, and so that is the one that you
have to focus on controlling, and you just have to hope and
trust in the other two.” Chabon’s hope and trust
certainly paid off.
Random House published
his third novel, The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in September
2000. Chabon is also the author of two collections of short
stories, A
Model World and Other Stories (1990) and Werewolves
In Their Youth (1999). His first young adult
novel, Summerland,
was published in 2002 by Talk Miramax Books and won the 2003
Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Children’s Literature. He
has also written articles and essays, a number of screenplays
and teleplays (as well as sharing story credit for Spiderman
2), and edited The
Best American Short Stories 2005. Chabon’s
story "Son of the Wolfman" was chosen for the 1999
O. Henry collection and for a National Magazine Award.The
Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was selected
by the American Library Association as one of the Notable Books
of 2000 and was a finalist for both the National Book Critics
Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Los Angeles
Times Book Prize. It won the New York Society Library Prize
for Fiction, the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award, the Commonwealth
Club Gold Medal, and the Pulitzer Prize. Chabon’s novella
The
Final Solution (2004) was awarded the 2005 National
Jewish Book Award and also the 2003 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction
by The Paris Review. Michael Chabon also writes a regular
column for the magazine Details.
Michael Chabon
has lectured widely on topics including the art and craft of
writing, the tradition of Jewish fiction, and Vladimir Nabokov,
to name but a very few. He has appeared before audiences all
over the United States and in Russia, Finland, Lithuania, Italy,
France, Great Britain, Germany and Canada. He has spoken to
the creative teams at Pixar Animation Studios about fantasy
and childhood, to the employees of Industrial Light and Magic
about the art of storytelling, and to many different literary,
Jewish, and corporate organizations about a wide variety of
topics.
Michael Chabon’s
novel, The
Yiddish Policemen's Union, is a hardboiled detective
novel set in an alternate world where Israel failed to be born
and millions of European Jewish refugees took shelter in Alaska
, creating a miniature American Yiddishland. It became a New
York Times bestseller immediately upon publication and was
nominated for both an Edgar Award and a Nebula Award for Best
Novel in 2008. In November 2007, his short swashbuckling adventure
novel, Gentlemen
of the Road, serialized in fifteen chapters in the
New York Times Sunday Magazine, was published by Del
Rey. Michael Chabon’s collection of essays entitled Maps
& Legends will be published by McSweeney’s in
March 2008.
•••
“Chabon is a
flat-out wonderful writer—evocative and inventive, pointed
and poignant.”
— Chicago Tribune
“A loving craftsman
and author of superb, seemingly alchemically-rendered sentences,
Chabon has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling,
fiction. ”
— The Los Angeles
Times Book Review |
