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MICHAEL CHABON
Tickets for the event with Michael Chabon will be available beginning at 6pm at the Box Office at Benaroya Hall with CASH OR CHECK ONLY. Tickets will be available at all seating levels.
Biography
Pop quiz: Name the writer who has garnered these seemingly incompatible, but praising reviews. From The Weekly Standard’s John Podhoretz: “The best writer of English prose in this country, and the most interesting novelist of his generation.” From Oprah: “Exuberant…Grand fun.” Answer: The mash-up that is Michael Chabon. From his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published in 1988 when he was just 25, to The Wonder Boys, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (winner of the Pulitzer Prize), two collections of short stories, two essay collections, a young adult novel (Summerland), a novella (The Final Solution) and his most recent novel, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, Chabon has simultaneously entertained us, literarily amazed us, and blown our academic minds. We’re talking Neil Diamond, Harry Houdini and Alfred Hitchcock shaken, mixed, and served up. Or, as John Leonard said of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union for The New York Review, it’s “as if Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick had smoked a joint with I. B. Singer.” A lover of comics and an avid reader of fantasy fiction, a school assignment at the age of ten—to write a short story involving Sherlock Holmes—convinced Chabon that he wanted to be a writer. And it’s as if that ten-year old boy is always in his mind, or in his fingertips. Chabon incorporates the best parts of genre fiction with the dexterous wordplay, cultural impact, and emotional force of what the academy considers “high” art. Influenced by pulp/genre writers Raymond Chandler, Ursula K. Le Guin, Frank Herbert, Ray Bradbury, and what he calls “borderland” writers—writers “who can dwell between worlds”—John Crowley, Jorge Luis Borges, Stephen Millhauser, Thomas Pynchon, to name a few—he sets up classic genre constructions and layers on stories of exile and belonging, identity, nationality, freedom, and destiny, then mixes them up with sports mythologies, folklore, and the workings of the human heart. Longing and regret are constant themes, but with a nod to Yiddish humor he keeps the bleak and funny in balance. “There’s always been this hunger for fantasy,” he says. “The world has always been awful, the world’s always sucked, mostly because of the things people do to one another. All you have to do is read the Bible. Just read Job.” Striving for that perfect blend of mystery, entertainment, and the revelations of fiction that open our eyes to something familiar turned new, something inside that we can turn out, something bewildering made small and clear, Chabon says: “A mind is blown when something you always feared but knew to be impossible turns out to be true; when the world turns out far vaster, far more marvelous or malevolent than you ever dreamed; when you get proof that everything is connected to everything else, that everything you know is wrong, that you are both the center of the universe and a tiny speck sailing off its nethermost edge.” Born in Washington D.C. in 1963, Chabon studied at Carnegie Mellon and received an MFA at UC Irvine. He lives with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their four children in Berkeley, California. Excerpt from “Ragnarok Boy,” Maps and Legends (2008) I was drawn to that darkness. I was repelled by it, too, but as the stories were presented I knew that I was supposed to be only repelled by the darkness and also, somehow, to blame myself for it. Doom and decay, crime and folly, sin and punishment, the imperative to work and sweat and struggle and suffer the Furies, these had entered the world with humankind: we brought them on ourselves. In the Bible it had all started out with a happy couple in the Garden of Eden; in the Greek myths, after a brief eon of divine patricide and child-devouring and a couple of wars in Heaven, there came a long and peaceful Golden Age. In both cases, we were meant to understand, the world had begun with light and been spoiled. Thousands of years of moralizers, preceptors, dramatists, hypocrites, and scolds had been at work on this material, with their dogma and their hang-ups and their refined sense of tragedy. Selected Fiction Selected Essay Collections Interview with Ramona Koval, The Book Show, ABC Radio, December 5, 2007 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum interview Michael Chabon for The New York Review of Books at the 2008 Democratic National Convention “The Fourteen Skies of Michael Chabon” by Ted Gioia, Great Books Guide The Amazing Website of Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon’s home page, defunct as of January 2007, but preserved via The Wayback Machine
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Benaroya Hall, 7:30 pm