Word: chabon
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...well-established fact that one of the main reasons for writing children's literature is that it offers so many chances for dialogue like that. (Just try to work that sentence into a romance novel.) Michael Chabon, who won the Pulitzer Prize last year for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, is a novelist who can fashion an elegant grownup story as if it were a piece of soft aluminum. But the opportunity to plunge into the burdleburple of sheer fantasy is one reason he wrote Summerland (Hyperion/Miramax; 500 pages), the kind of book that features a motherly Sasquatch, some...
Another famous reason to write children's literature is that it gets you back in touch with your inner child. For Chabon, 39, that may not be much of an incentive, since in person he comes across like a man who already exchanges regular e-mails with his inner child and plays paintball tag with him all the time. But lately there's a big new reason for writing stories aimed at "young readers," the publishing-industry term for kids who are done with picture books but not quite ready for Tolstoy and Candace Bushnell. It's Harry Potter. Harry...
...Chabon (pronounced Shay-bon) is the best known of a field of established authors who are all at once producing books for the Potterhead age group and up. This fall brings titles by the Chilean novelist Isabel Allende; Carl Hiassen, the deadpan satirist of modern Florida; and Clive Barker, the ghoul--or whatever you would call the man behind the Hellraiser films. There's serious money here. Even before Barker's book appears in stores, Disney has reportedly paid $8 million for the film, merchandising and theme-park rights to his characters. Theme-park rights? This never happened to Faulkner...
...Chabon runs his fingers through his unkempt hair and looks up at the ceiling. He's one of those radiant-child adults, the kind you can imagine as the dreamy fourth-grader he must once have been. We're in his big Arts and Crafts-style house in Berkeley, Calif., with his wife Ayelet Waldman, a former public defender turned crime novelist, and their three children, Sophie, 7; Zeke, 5; and Ida-Rose, 16 months. Chabon and his wife live in a noisy, kid-centered world. Waldman's books are about a former public defender turned stay-at-home...
...wasn't thinking about Harry Potter for a second when I wrote Summerland," Chabon insists. But he admits that "it helped pave the way. It made the idea of a children's book so much more thinkable for writers." Even when you put aside the money, what writer would not want to have J.K. Rowling's impact on the world? Because of Rowling's Harry Potter series, millions of children have decided, at least for a while, that the most important thing in their lives is not a Powerpuff Girls movie, a pro-wrestling action figure or Britney...