Word: chabon
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...Michael Chabon's new mystery novel, The Final Solution (Fourth Estate; 131 pages)--hang on, let's back up. This is Pulitzer prizewinning Michael Chabon? Wonder Boys and Kavalier & Clay Michael Chabon? Byronic hair Michael Chabon? Why would an esteemed, respectable literary novelist like Chabon want to sully his fancy-pants reputation with a mystery novel...
...tough, fibrous membrane that used to separate literary fiction from popular fiction is rupturing. The highbrow and the lowbrow, once kept chastely separate, are now hooking up, which is why we have great, funky, unclassifiable writers like Margaret Atwood, Neal Stephenson, Susanna Clarke and David Mitchell. And like Chabon, who in addition to writing The Final Solution has edited an anthology of hybrid highbrow-lowbrow tales, McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories (Vintage; 328 pages). And like Jonathan Lethem, who has just published Men and Cartoons (Doubleday; 160 pages), a collection of highly literary stories about, among other things...
...detective in The Final Solution is almost certainly meant to be our old friend Sherlock Holmes, although Chabon never names him. Chabon's Holmes is long past his Baker Street prime: at 89, he has become a frail, eccentric, beekeeping retiree. Mystery comes looking for the aging detective in the form of a mute boy, 9, and his pet parrot (the symmetry is neat but not too: a boy who can't speak and a bird that can). Before long, the parrot is missing, a man is dead, and Holmes is back in the game...
Friday night was the annual Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards ceremony. As with any awards the recipients ranged from well deserving to downright baffling. Michael Chabon, author of the comic-themed novel "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay," delivered the keynote speech lamenting the lack of comics for kids. Accusing the industry of abandoning children, he laid out some suggestions for re-capturing what used to be the medium's core audience, including putting actual kid characters into kids comics. In spite of its critical nature, the speech was met with strong applause. Highlights of the awards included Derek...
Pulitzer-prizewinning novels don't usually get comic-book tie-ins, but with Michael Chabon's comic-themed The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, the move makes sense. The Escapist (Dark Horse Comics), a new quarterly anthology series, collects stories starring the novel's Houdini-like superhero. The first issue includes the Chabon-written origin of the Escapist, with art by Eric Wight, along with several tongue-in-cheek tales by other comic-book writers and artists. Each one evokes a different period of the medium's history: Howard Chaykin turns in a '50s-style hard-boiled story...