The Pulitzer Prize-winning author— "an immensely gifted
writer and a magical prose stylist" (Michiko Kakutani, New
York Times)—offers his first major work of nonfiction, an
autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and
powerful as his acclaimed, award-winning fiction.
A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of
a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces, Manhood for
Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing
from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative,
slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and
humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of
life in the way so many of us experience our own lives: as
a series of reflections, regrets, and reexaminations, each
sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some
legacy of the past.
What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and
interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with
characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and
family history that haunts him even as—simply because—it
goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a
passionate husband, and above all as the father of four
young Americans, Chabon presents his memories of childhood,
of his parents' marriage and divorce, of moments of painful
adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art
and literature of his own youth, as a theme played—on
different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key—
by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-
conductor.
At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, Manhood for
Amateurs is destined to become a classic.
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