Moonglow; A Novel
Benjamin Tice Smith (Author photograph) New York: Harper [An Imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers], 2016. First Edition [Stated], First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. 430, [4] pages. Occasional footnotes. Signed First Edition sticker on the front of the DJ. Signed on a specially bound edition sheet in advance of the title page. Illustrated endpaper. Minor soiling at bottom of front endpaper. Michael Chabon (born May 24, 1963) is an American novelist, screenwriter, columnist and short story writer. He graduated from the University of Pittsburgh, graduating in 1984. He received a Master of Fine Arts in creative writing from the University of California, Irvine. Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988). He followed it with Wonder Boys (1995) and two short-story collections. In 2000, he published The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a novel that John Leonard would later call Chabon's magnum opus. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001. His novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union, an alternate history mystery novel won the Hugo, Sidewise, Nebula and Ignotus awards; his serialized novel Gentlemen of the Road appeared in book form in the fall of the same year. In 2012, Chabon published Telegraph Avenue, billed as "a twenty-first century Middlemarch," concerning the tangled lives of two families in the San Francisco Bay Area. His latest novel, Moonglow, is a fictionalized memoir of his maternal grandfather, based on his deathbed confessions under the influence of powerful painkillers in Chabon's mother's California home in 1989. Chabon's work is characterized by complex language, and the frequent use of metaphor along with recurring themes such as nostalgia, divorce, abandonment, fatherhood, and most notably issues of Jewish identity. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure and the forces that work to destroy us. In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother's home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon's grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as my grandfather. It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact, and the creative power, of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator's grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York's Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the American Century, the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive. Condition: Very good / Very good.
Keywords: Terminal Illness, Deathbed, Confession, Madness, Grandfather, War, Adventure, Sex, Adventure, Marriage, Rocketry, Desire, Secrets, Speculative Autobiography, Jews, Retirement, Wallkill Prison, Space Program, War-torn France
ISBN: 9780062225559
[Book #84987]
Price: $125.00