About this item
Highlights
- "Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving's inventive sleight of hand. . . .
- Author(s): Michael Chabon
- 336 Pages
- Biography + Autobiography, Personal Memoirs
Description
About the Book
In his first sustained work of personal writing, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Chabon offers these provocative, autobiographical essays--a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each sparked by an encounter in the present.Book Synopsis
"Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus stories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving's inventive sleight of hand. . . . As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality."
-- Michiko Kakutani, New York Times
"Wondrous, wise and beautiful."
-- David Kamp, New York Times Book Review
The bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Werewolves in Their Youth, Wonderboys, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and The Yiddish Policemen's Union Michael Chabon "takes [his] brutally observant, unfailingly honest, marvelously human gaze and turns it on his own life" (Time) in the New York Times bestselling memoir Manhood for Amateurs.
From the Back Cover
A Best Book Of The Year
Time - St. Louis Post-Dispatch - Kansas City Star San Francisco Chronicle - NPR - Seattle Times
A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers addresses with his characteristic warmth and lyric wit the all-important question: What does it mean to be a man today?
Review Quotes
"Hilarious, moving, pleasurable, disturbing, transcendent, restless. . . . And seemingly by accident, Chabon ultimately does create a composite image of ideal manhood, one that is modest, responsible, bemused, empathic, and thoughtful." -- Jeremy Adam Smith, San Francisco Chronicle
"Chabon brings his prodigiously entertaining verbal intelligence to a very personal investigation of what it means to be a father, a son, and a husband." -- Lev Grossman, Time (Top 10 Nonfiction Books Citation)
"Wry and heartfelt, Chabon's riffs uncover brand-new insights in even the most quotidian subjects. . . . He applies an unusual level of wit and candor to the form." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Both lyrical and side-splittingly funny. . . . Readers seeking the intelligence of Updike; the gentle, brainy appeal of Sedaris; or the literary virtuosity of Nabokov will thoroughly enjoy." -- Douglas C. Lord, Library Journal
"Chabon takes a big, fat swing at the essay form with his second collection and achieves success. . . . These warm and thoughtful essays underscore just how good a wordsmith Chabon is-regardless of the form he chooses." -- Jerry Eberle, Booklist