Bookends

August 1, 2018

Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon is such a mellifluous writer that I would read a compilation of his grocery lists. Here he collects introductions and afterwords, both classics and ones he has written, that he feels reflect a passion for reading and bring pleasure to the reader. With a 60,000-copy first printing.

Copyright 2018 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

October 22, 2018
Pulitzer Prize–winner Chabon (Pops) presents a collection of brief but insightful essays, most of them introductions or afterwards (“outros”) to his own and others’ books. Selections from the latter category reflect his fascination with genre fiction, pop culture, and childhood, and were originally written for, among other things, a Ray Bradbury short story, the classic children’s novel The Phantom Tollbooth, an anthology of Mars sci-fi sagas, an art book devoted to superhero costumes, and a study of Wes Anderson films. In the pieces about Chabon’s own work, he is especially strong in reflecting on his writing process, for example in the foreword to his YA novel Summerland, which punctures the easy clichés authors use to explain how they find their subjects (“The whole book just came to me, like a vision, complete”). Chabon’s range of interests, though it includes room for a cookbook, will chiefly appeal to his fans and to readers fascinated by superheroes and fantasy. Some of the intros reproduced could use introductions of their own, as it is disorienting trying to find a foothold into books one has never heard of (and few readers will be familiar with every single book). Nevertheless, the essays are intelligent and entertaining, and being none too long, can be read easily and quickly. Agent: Daniel Kirschen, ICM.

November 15, 2018
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author goes his own way writing about some of his favorite books and comics.Chabon (Pops: Fatherhood in Pieces, 2018, etc.) eagerly returns to the beloved genres of his youth in this joyous collection covering nearly 20 years of introductions, prefaces, forewords, and afterwords to adventure tales, sci-fi, ghost stories, comic books, and his own books, all written in the "hope of bringing pleasure to the reader--to some reader, somewhere." He confesses he read Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth at least five or six times. Though it didn't make him want to be a writer--that came later with Arthur Conan Doyle--Juster's "world of wonders" still gives him a "tiny thrill of nostalgia and affection for the wonderful book." Stop "reading this nonsense," he chides, and go read the book. That advice reflects a common theme in this collection: Chabon, the fan, urging readers to read these stories. He firmly believes M.R. James' ghost story, "Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad," is one of the "finest short stories ever written." He confesses that the "splendor and fragility" of Ray Bradbury's story "The Rocket Man," which Chabon first read when he was 10, was the "most important short story in my life as a writer." Bradbury "gave me my first everlasting lessons in literary style." Chabon waxes euphoric about the "remarkable artistic achievement" of Michael Moorcock's heroic fantasy, The Sailor on the Seas of Fate, as he does about Howard Chaykin, the "craftsman, an artisan of pop," and his experiments in comic book art. There are two pieces about Chabon's abandoned, early "disaster," Fountain City, one on Summerland, and one on The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and discovering his need to write in "traditional, bourgeois narrative form." The author closes with a couple liner notes about Mark Ronson and the Pittsburgh "post-punk" band Carsickness.Eclectic, exuberant fandom from Chabon.

COPYRIGHT(2018) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

November 15, 2018
Chabon, the incandescently imaginative and artful author of a dozen works of fiction, including Moonglow (2016), is a connoisseur of introductions and postscripts. In his Meta-Introduction to this lively collection of his warmly conversant intros and outros, he offers fresh and illuminating analysis of the various styles and intentions of forewords, an often-dismissed literary form that he turns into scintillating hybrids of literary appreciation and memoir. Chabon devotees will relish his ensnaring essays for the insights they provide into his inspirations, including the supernatural literature of M. R. James; Michael Moorcock's heroic fantasies; Ray Bradbury's The Rocket Man; Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (1961); Wes Anderson's films; and the works of various comic-book artists, including Ben Katchor. Of particular tenderness and grace is the prelude to his own novel Summerland (2002), in which Chabon writes about his boyhood fascination with fairies, family sorrow, and the magic of books, which, while you read, could bind up and repair all the cracks in the world, relight the lamps, restore what had been lost, heal what had been broken. (Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)