Saturday, February 03, 2007

Michael Chabon New Work Serialized in NYT

Michael Chabon New Work Serialized in NYT

Michael Chabon sometimes seems to be everywhere. Most recently, his latest story is being serialized in the New York Times Funny Pages (it's prose, just to set that straight.) The serialization began last Sunday and this week's installment is already available online.
I'm going to confess that I haven't read any of his prose yet, though this piece on my list for this weekend. But the Dragon is a huge fan of The Escapist comics, one of the coolest and freshest (as well as post-modern) approaches to Super-Hero comics ... as the fanboys say... Evah.
This latest work is titled Gentlemen of the Road. It's apparently set around 1000 AD, and had a working title of "Jews with Swords." I'm intrigued.
I consulted Mr. Chabon's Wikipedia page for this post, mostly because his name has been attached to so many things I have enjoyed, or look forward to in the future. Besides the projects listed above, he has written for McSweeney's, wrote the book which the movie Wonderboys was based on, and won a Pulitzer for his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. (Still waiting to come across a copy of that one.) I'm fascinated with how he seems to jump between literary works and writing comics, and there is a great section on Wikipedia pertaining to this:

In 2005, Chabon argued against the idea that genre fiction, and entertaining fiction, shouldn't appeal to "the real writer," saying that the common perception is that "Entertainment....means junk. [But] maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted--indeed, we have helped to articulate--such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment....I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period."[18]
Among the more positive responses to Chabon's brand of "trickster literature" appeared in Time magazine, whose Lev Grossman wrote that "This is literature in mid-transformation....[t]he highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, [and] you can almost see the future of literature coming."[19]

(Wikipedia's footnotes maintained to please commentors, who have been clamoring for citations.)

2 comments:

Combatscoot said...

I think I just read a book by him: The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Klay. Very good read. Very gritty and real.
John

Anonymous said...

michael chabon has been my favorite author since 1993 when i read his first novel THE MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH...

since then i've read everything he's written... but when i learned that he sold out to hollywood by allowing the director of DODGEBALL to make the film version of MOP and CHANGE 85% of the story, i completely lost faith in him as a writer and a human being.

not sure if you're interested or have read MOP but if you'd like to compare the novel to the screenplay drop me a line and i'll send you a copy: bechstein[at]yahoo[dot]com

i've also started a boycott of the film online... check it out-- http://groups.myspace.com/MOPfilm