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Item Barcode | Collection | Call Number | Status | Item Holds |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 33607003318550 | Adult Nonfiction | 306.874 CHABON | Searching... Unknown | Searching... Unavailable |
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Summary
Summary
"Magical prose stylist" Michael Chabon (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) delivers a collection of essays--heartfelt, humorous, insightful, wise--on the meaning of fatherhood.
For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then thirteen, to Paris Men's Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at "thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties," sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time. Despite his own indifference, however, what gradually emerged as Chabon ferried his son to and from fashion shows was a deep respect for his son's passion. The piece quickly became a viral sensation.
With the GQ story as its centerpiece, and featuring six additional essays plus an introduction, Pops illuminates the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood as only Michael Chabon can.
Author Notes
Michael Chabon was born in Washington, D.C. on May 24, 1963. He received a B.A. in English literature from the University of Pittsburgh in 1985 and a Master of Fine Arts degree in English writing at the University of California at Irvine in 1987.
Chabon found success at the age of 24, when William Morrow publishing house offered him $155,000, a near-record sum, for the rights to his first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, which was his thesis in graduate school. After The Mysteries of Pittsburgh became a national bestseller, he began writing a series of short stories about a little boy dealing with his parents' divorce. The stories, which in part appeared in The New Yorker and G.Q., were bound together in 1991 into a volume titled A Model World and Other Stories. His other works include Wonder Boys, The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man, Telegraph Avenue, and Pop: Fatherhood in Pieces. In 2001 he won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. He and Ayelet Waldman are co-editors of, Kingdom of Olives and Ash: Writers Confront the Occupation..
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (2)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Pulitzer-winning novelist Chabon (Moonglow) brings together a deeply affecting collection of essays that scrutinize and celebrate the complexities of relationships between fathers and their children. Selections range from the quietly heartbreaking, as when Chabon describes the inadvertent hurt a father can impart on a child, to the hilarious, as he describes his son taking his idiosyncratic sense of style into the ¿heteronormative jaws of seventh grade.¿ Avoiding an overly sentimental tone or rose-colored perspective, Chabon doesn¿t shy away from reflecting on parental failures as well as successes. In the particularly moving essay ¿Little Man,¿ he regrets missing the signs one son sends as he struggles to create his own identity (¿You are born into a family and those are your people, and they know you and they love you, and if you are lucky, they even on occasion manage to understand you. And that ought to be enough. But it is never enough¿). Chabon is a gifted essayist whose narratives lead to unexpected and resonant conclusions. His work here packs an outsized emotional punch that will stick with readers significantly longer than it takes them to read this slim volume. (May)
Library Journal Review
A well-known author once told Pulitzer Prize winner Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay; Wonder Boys; Telegraph Avenue), "You can write books or you can have kids...you lose a book for every child." Yet Chabon, father of four, argues that books, unlike children, don't love you back. So begins this literary ode to parenting in which the author admires his son Abe's rare gift for doing things with panache but struggles to understand his love for fashion, stumbles over bedtime reading, and ponders how to teach his son how to treat the women in his life even as he explores his own foibles and failures in this regard. As parenting is likely to lead to self-reflection, Chabon further examines his own childhood through the looking glass, contemplating his decision not to follow in his father's footsteps and become a doctor. In the last section, Chabon writes about visiting his father, who is hospitalized for a possibly fatal infection, meditating on his own relationship with Dad. VERDICT Literary and emotionally provocative, Chabon's memoir is a quick read that will appeal to parents as well as fans of his fiction. [See Prepub Alert, 11/12/17.] © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Table of Contents
| Introduction: The Opposite of Writing | p. 1 |
| Little Man | p. 15 |
| Adventures in Euphemism | p. 45 |
| The Bubble People | p. 53 |
| Against Dickitude | p. 63 |
| The Old Ball Game | p. 77 |
| Be Cool or Be Cast Out | p. 93 |
| Pops | p. 107 |