Telegraph Avenue - by Michael Chabon (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

New York Times Bestseller

"A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage. . . Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time." -- Benjamin Percy, Esquire

New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen's Union); to discover The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us to Telegraph Avenue in a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. In Telegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture--Kung Fu, '70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music--and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there--longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart--half tavern, half temple--stands Brokeland.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

From the Back Cover

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there--longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart--half tavern, half temple--stands Brokeland.

When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complications to the couples' already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe's life.

Review Quotes

"'Virtuosity' is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Yiddish Policeman's Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable." - Publishers Weekly

"An end-of-an era epic....A Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"An exhilarating, bighearted novel." - O magazine

"Chabon has a near effortless ability to reveal the huge universal human truths that scaffold absurdly specific circumstances, and he does so on nearly every page here." - Emily SImon, Buffalo News

"A sparkling, mesmerizing read....That's what Chabon's books do, sentence after sentence, page after page: they force you to bring your game up to his level....His writer's eye makes the world a more vivid, vital place to live." - Michael Bourne, The Millions

"An achingly poignant vibe of sweet and soulful idealism makes itself heard throughout Telegraph Avenue....It's a dream worth imagining, and Chabon does so with skill, charm, and no small amount of virtuosic writing." - Diane Cole, Jewish Week

"As ever, Chabon is a performing magician. He can take any topic and stage it so the crowd smiles and even oohs its amazement....Chabon makes a grab for the entire world in a single bighearted book." - Darin Strauss, New York Times Book Review

"[Chabon] is a truly gifted writer of prose: He writes long, luxurious sentences that swoop and meander before circling back in on themselves, not infrequently approximating the improvisational jazz that Archy and Nat hold so dear." - Associated Press

"A jam that grooves, entertains, entrances and sticks in your head with infectious melodies....[Chabon] is a hypnotizing master of language, crafting fresh descriptors for familiar functions, poetic detours that never sacrifice narrative flow, well-oiled metaphorical machinations, and seamless time travelling that makes the phrase 'flashback' seem obsolete." - Jake Austen, Chicago Tribune

"This is a novel rich in story and character, rich in its dialogue and descriptions, rich in spirit and invention - and full of sharp, funny writing....The spirit of Telegraph Avenue is one of union and reconciliation, a welcome, exuberant voice in our fractious times." - David Walton, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Forget Joycean or Bellovian or any other authorial allusion. Telegraph Avenue might best be described as Chabonesque. Exuberantly written, generously peopled, its sentences go off like a summer fireworks show, in strings of bursting metaphor." - Jess Walter, San Francisco Chronicle

"A buoyant novel, written with the author's typical stylistic elegance and empathetic imagination....His prose is as energizing as ever, in part because he's always willing to try high-risk maneuvers up on the figurative balance beam." - Troy Patterson, Slate

"While pop culture nostalgia abounds with an emphasis on comic books (a Chabon favorite) and '70s movies, music on vinyl, and a reverence for it, also play a steady groove in the narrative, and the writing--stylized, humorous and often dazzling--is inflected with tones of jazz and funk. But it's Chabon's ear for the sounds of the human soul that make this book a masterpiece, as his vividly drawn characters learn to live at the intersection of disappointment and hope." - Robin Micheli, People (4 stars)

"The writing - stylized, humorous and often dazzling - is inflected with tones of jazz and funk. But it's Chabon's ear for the sounds of the human soul that make this book a masterpiece, as his vividly drawn characters learn to live at the intersection of disappointment and hope." - Robin Micheli, People (4 out of 4 stars)

"He writes with such warmth and humor and sheer enthusiasm - for his characters, for the rhythms and atmosphere of Oakland, for geek culture, for the mysterious power of music, which he captures with uncommon descriptive virtuosity - that by the end it's hard to resist this charmingly earnest book." - Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly

"A moving, sprawling, modern-day tale that uses the improvisational shifts and rhythms of jazz and soul to tell the story of two couples....With seeming ease, Chabon shifts from high-wire flourishes...to moments of crystalline simplicity." - Robert Bianco, USA Today (4 out of 4 stars)

"Spectacular." - Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

"As always, Chabon's gorgeous prose astonishes, particularly in the Joycean chapter 'A Bird of Wide Experience'....Like that colorful bird, Telegraph Avenue dazzles and soars." - Cliff Froehlich, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"A stylized, rapturous novel....Telegraph Avenue entertains with a riotous mashup of comics, kung fu, '70s jazz and family strife, but at the core lie some startlingly sober revelations." - Zane Jungman, Austin American-Statesman

"One of Chabon's great gifts is an ability to beguile us with prose that exudes warmth into seeing ourselves in others, to even know them as ourselves. It's a feat that parlays Telegraph Avenue, with its diverse population, into an All-American novel, one of the great ones." - Sherryl Connelly, Daily News

"Astounding....steamrolls the barrier that has kept the Great American Novel at odds with the country it's supposed to reflect....[A] huge-hearted, funny, improbably hip book." - John Freeman, Boston Globe

"Chabon has made a career of routing big, ambitious projects through popular genres, with superlative results....The scale of Telegraph Avenue is no less ambitious....Much of the wit...inheres in Chabon's astonishing prose. I don't just mean the showy bits...I mean the offhand brilliance that happens everywhere." - Jennifer Egan, New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"Witty and compassionate and full of more linguistic derring-do than any other writer in American could carry off." - Ron Charles, Washington Post

"Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, it's as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words. A vibrant affection for a place, time and culture - 1970s Oakland/Berkeley, blaxploitation films and funky jazz - feeds that energy, but there's more. His sentences spring, bounce, set off sparklers, even when dwelling in mundane details....Fans have been waiting five years since Chabon's bestselling novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union....That book's world was so distant from our own that it won major science fiction prizes....Telegraph Avenue is fantastic, but in a different way: It returns to the realism of his earliest novels....Dizzying language, a delight in process and paragraph after paragraph of word-drunk riffs." - Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Telegraph Avenue is so exuberant, it's as if Michael Chabon has pulled joy from the air and squeezed it into the shape of words....His sentences spring, bounce, set off sparklers, even when dwelling in mundane details....Fantastic." - Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Fresh, unpretentious, delectably written....For all his explorations into the contentious dynamics of family, race and community, Mr. Chabon's first desire is simply to enchant with words. Eight novels in, he still uses language like someone amazed by a newly discovered superpower." - Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"A genuinely moving story about race and class, parenting and marriage...Chabon is inarguably one of the greatest prose stylists of all time, powering out sentences that are the equivalent of executing a triple back flip on a bucking bull while juggling chain saws and making love to three women." - Benjamin Percy, Esquire

"Chabon's hugely likable characters all face crises of existential magnitude, rendered in an Electra Glide flow of Zen sentences and zinging metaphors that make us wish the needle would never arrive at the final groove." - Elle

"A beautiful, prismatic maximalism of description and tone, a sly meditation on appropriation as the real engine of integration, and an excellent rationale for twelve-page sentences." - Kelsey Dake, GQ

"An amazingly rich, emotionally detailed story....[Chabon's] people become so real to us, their problems so palpably netted in the author's buoyant, expressionistic prose, that the novel gradually becomes a genuinely immersive experience--something increasingly rare in our ADD age." - Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"His most mature, accessible fiction to date...An engrossing, well-crafted drama of family and friendship....Chabon's storytelling gifts seem to know no bounds, and the dexterity with which he crafts his beautiful prose is often breathtaking." - Jeremy Garber, The Oregonian

"A dazzling star turn of a novel that showcases Chabon's writing talents like a digital TV screen above Times Square....Chabon does love popular culture, but he loves humanity more, and that love is the power behind this sweeping novel." - Bob Hoover, Minneapolis Star Tribune

"Chabon's inventiveness requires language dazzling and deft enough to put it across, and like most of his later work, Telegraph Avenue reads easy - I downed 300 pages flying back from Denmark, stopping only to eat and nap." - Robert Christgau, barnesandnoble.com

"A dazzling display of sheer writing ability from the prodigiously talented Chabon." - Philadelphia Inquirer

"Chabon is an extraordinarily generous writer. He is generous to his characters, to his landscapes, to syntax, to words, to his readers--there is a real joy in his work....Both ambitious and lighthearted, the novel is a touching, gentle, comic meditation." - Cathleen Schine, New York Review of Books

"Michael Chabon is the Michael Jordan of American novelists....Telegraph Avenue could serve as a master class on how to write a novel." - John Broening, Denver Post

"If any novelist can pack the entire American zeitgeist into 500 pages, it's Chabon....Ambitious, densely written, sometimes very funny, and fabulously over the top, here's a rare book that really could be the great American novel." - Library Journal (starred review)

"A magnificently crafted, exuberantly alive, emotionally lustrous, and socially intricate saga....Bubbling with lovingly curated knowledge about everything from jazz to pregnancy...Chabon's rhapsodically detailed, buoyantly plotted, warmly intimate cross-cultural tale of metamorphoses is electric with suspense, humor, and bebop dialogue....An embracing, radiant masterpiece." - Booklist, starred review

"[Telegraph Avenue] has a Great American Novel heft to it--probably because, all caps aside, it is a great American novel." - Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine

"Chabon not only knows how [his characters] feel, but how they talk. His dialogue is a thing to behold, the plot unrelenting. And I can't imagine any writer, male or female, ever delivering a more breathtaking description of a woman giving birth. Some midwife, this Chabon." - Dan Cryer, Newsday

"Displays both his sense of ordinary people's inner lives and his rich, freewheeling prose....A dense, flavorful book about race, class, politics, culture and sexuality, as expansive and ambitious as anything Chabon has published to date....An essential, unforgettable read." - Ben Pfeiffer, Kansas City Star