Collected Fiction

Collected Fiction

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Wonder Boys, and Werewolves in Their Youth

Michael Chabon

Three extraordinary works by the New York Times–bestselling, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and Moonglow.  

A trio of acclaimed masterworks of contemporary fiction by multiple award-winning author Michael Chabon, hailed by the Washington Post Book World as "a young American Nabokov."  

The Mysteries of Pittsburgh: Michael Chabon's "astonishing" debut (The New York Times) follows Art Bechstein, a man still too young to know what he wants. He only knows what he doesn't want: the life of his money-laundering father. During the summer after graduation he's finding his own way with brilliant and seductive new friends—erudite Arthur Lecomte, the confounding and mercurial Phlox, and a poetry-reciting biker who pulls Art inevitably back into his father's mobbed-up world.

Wonder Boys: Grady Tripp's first novel made him a literary star. Seven years later, he's a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but alienated student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp finally confronts the wreckage of his past in a "wise, wildly funny" (Chicago Tribune) reckoning with the self-destructive decisions of his life.

Werewolves in Their Youth: An indelible cast of characters finds themselves at crossroads in this astonishing collection of short fiction. A young misfit fails to protect his best friend from the scorn of their classmates; a kleptomaniac real estate agent leads an unhappy couple on a disastrous house tour; and a heartbroken grifter finds his ex-girlfriend's grandmother is both an easy mark and a source of redemption. "When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing" (USA Today).

About the Author

Michael Chabon (born 1963, Washington, D.C.) is one of the most celebrated American novelists of his generation, and Jewish history, identity, and imagination run through much of his best-known work. His Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2000) follows two Jewish cousins, one a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague, who create comic-book heroes in 1940s New York; it joins the immigrant experience, the Holocaust’s shadow, and the Golem legend with the birth of American popular culture. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007), a hard-boiled detective story set in an alternate-history Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, imagines a Yiddish-speaking homeland that never lasted, and it won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sidewise Awards. Other works return to Jewish themes, among them the essay collection Maps and Legends, the novella The Final Solution, the novel Telegraph Avenue, which explores Black-Jewish relations and shared cultural ground in Oakland, and the family memoir Moonglow. Throughout, Chabon writes about exile, inheritance, memory, and the question of what it means to belong.

Chabon has also been an active public voice on Jewish literary culture, and he has argued for a renewed, playful engagement with Yiddish language and tradition and for the creative possibilities of Jewish storytelling. His other honors include the Michael L. Printz Award for Young Adult Literature (for Summerland’s companion recognition in the field, as well as a National Jewish Book Award), and he is a recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, the writer Ayelet Waldman.

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