Word: chabon
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Given that Summerland's publisher, Miramax Books, is an affiliate of Miramax studios, guess who will produce the inevitable Summerland film? Miramax Books had already embarked on its blatant Harry Potter knock-off, the Artemis Fowl series, when Chabon came by with his idea for something subtler, a story about a struggle to fend off the end of everything, hinging upon baseball games played in a magical parallel world. The hero is that classic figure of children's literature, the semiabandoned child. Ethan Feld is 11. His mother has died of cancer. His loving but grieving father is absorbed...
...game in which errors are actually counted, and Ethan is the kind of player who lets easy pop flies drift over his mitt. All the same, Ethan is recruited to head a team being formed by the ferishers, a race of fairy folk who are struggling to prevent Coyote, Chabon's semiappealing Satan figure, from poisoning the waters that nourish the Tree of the World, which holds up the four worlds, which can be magically traversed by scampering around the Tree, which...Let's just say that when it comes to elaborate plotting, Proust has nothing on Chabon...
...addition to Tolkien and C.S. Lewis, to teach the enduring children's book lessons about finding strength within yourself. Like Sammy Clay, the self-doubting hero of Kavalier & Clay, Ethan goes through much of the book convinced that he is not up to the task assigned to him. Chabon himself has talked about feeling like a fraud sometimes, even as the reviews and prizes poured in. But the beauty of writing as an occupation is that personal anxiety just gives you one more way into your characters. "I have more confidence now in my abilities as a writer," he says...
Some people would call it a charmed life anyway. Chabon has been a published novelist almost from the moment he completed the graduate writing program at the University of California at Irvine. The manuscript he produced for his master's degree was passed along by his thesis adviser to an agent. Eventually it became The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, the 1988 book that got him noticed immediately as a young writer on the rise. "I've been very lucky all my life," he says. "You can't help but feel that you don't deserve it. You're an impostor, impersonating...
...Chabon's rise stalled for a while as he spent nearly five years on an ever enlarging but never completed novel. In time he put the ballooning manuscript aside and started a new novel about a pot-smoking college professor with his own long-unfinished novel. Wonder Boys was a wry 1995 book that became a witty movie last year with Michael Douglas and Robert Downey Jr. But it was Kavalier & Clay that made the superabundance of Chabon's gifts superapparent. The story of two boys who invent a Nazi-bashing comic-book hero during World...