NB: A certain revered and now fallen literary editor, when he was at The New Republic, assigned me to consider Chabon’s entire oeuvre from a less starry-eyed perspective than most. So I did, for a month, to the exclusion of all other paying work, as a 20-something freelancer with zero disposable income. He never replied. […]
Falling in love, falling out of love, and finding something greater than both We met cute, real-life edition: Three years older, she was in the exit lane of a failing young marriage, and, being 24, I was struggling to distinguish my rear end from my elbow. I was moderating a talk uptown, and she was
The last time we had been in this part of Europe together was 23 years before, when we arrived in Italy as stateless refugees.
Pockets Still Empty, But Now They Are Deeper Read More »
It started in the summer of 2008. The Multnomah County library in Portland, Ore., wanted me to return its Russian translation of Stephen Hunter’s thriller “Dirty White Boys.”
“Fifth Sunday in a row,” the ski instructor in the blue staff jacket said, shaking his head and pointing at the fine powder descending peaceably all around us. “There’s 90 inches of snow at the top of that mountain.”
Dispatch: Northern New Mexico Read More »
The mayor of a drill-town in Texas tries to persuade an economically battered corner of upstate New York with recently discovered gas reserves to stay away from drilling.
After World War II, when my grandfather returned to Minsk, the capital of Soviet Belarus, his parents suggested he become an electrician. He refused and became a barber instead. “I wanted to work in a clean smock, not a dirty one,” he said. (Barbers in the Soviet Union wore smocks.)
The reviewer who makes a stink about Michael Chabon’s fiction is a bit like that kid at the birthday party who insists, to the fury of his classmates, on calling out the magician’s ruse, or the high-school crank who keeps yelling that the prom queen throttles kittens for leisure. Nobody wants to know. Book reviewers – not a tribe distinguished by the impulse to gratuitous charity – have mostly fallen over themselves in mouth-agape wonder at Chabon’s talent.
Review: The Yiddish Policemen’s Union by Michael Chabon Read More »