Tell a friend about this book...
Friend's Email:
Subject: I have found a book that I think you would enjoy
Member $avings: $16,044,979.92
|
Books Available: 4,136,119
|
Members Online: 2,022
Your source for swapping books online - Read...Swap...Save!
How To Swap Books?
Sign Up
Search 
Kiosk
All Books
Book Browser
Advanced Search
Books Posted Today
Member Book Reviews
NYT Best Seller List
Newbery Medal Winners
Pulitzer Prize Winners
Most Traveled Copies
Club Wish List
Login
Community
Member Directory
Discussion Forums
Blog
Live Chat (3)
Box-O-Books
Book Journal
Maps
The Eclectic Pen
Fun Stuff
Top 50s
Pulse of PBS
Spread The Word
Photo Gallery
Recipes
Club Tag Cloud
Member Testimonials
Friends of PBS
Help Center
Kiosk
Need Help?
Search - The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
|
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Author: |
|
|||
Book Information
|
|||||
Other Versions of this Book: Paperback, Audio Cassette (Abridged), Audio Cassette, Audio CD (Abridged), Audio CD
Book Description:
With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers.
It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.
The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys - and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.
It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.
The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys - and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.
Members who requested this book also requested:
Similar books to this author and title:
|  |  |
Genres:
Top Member Book Reviews
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
7/8/08 I find myself surrounded by heroes: on television, in the movies and the heroes that Chabon invents are in every way super. Josef Kavalier is a Czech 19 year old trained as a magician and escape artist who in October of 1938 comes to live with his cousin in Brooklyn Sammy Clay. Sammy, raised on optimism and comic books convinces his bosses at a novelty toy company to let he and Joe and his friends draw the comic book hero the Escapist.
“A costumed hero whose power would be that of impossible and perpetual escape… He offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom.”
In the Escapist, Joe and Sammy create a character who they and their audience believe could change the world. In drawing and writing him they transform themselves. Joe falls in love with Rosa, Sam falls in love guiltily with Bacon, the first actor to play the Escapist on radio. And they have various other adventures, as befits comic book heroes.
“Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth, his beloved teacher Bernard Kornblum, his city, his history -- his home-- the usual charge leveled against comic book, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually a powerful argument on their behalf. He had escaped, in his life, from ropes, chains, boxes, bags, and crates, from handcuffs and shackles, from countries and regimes, from the arms of a woman who loved him, from crashed airplanes and an opiate addiction and from an entire continent intent on causing his death. The escape from reality was, he felt -- especially right after the war -- a worthy challenge.”
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
Multi-layered story involving the birth of comic books, the comic book wars, and two cousins (one who escaped from Prague) during WW II, in NYC. I'm looking forward to his next book.
1 member(s) found this review helpful.
This is one of my top ten favorite books ...
what a fantastic storyteller Mr. Chabon is!
You will especially love it if you are from NYC
and enjoy World War II era novels.
Book Wiki
Series
Original Publication Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
People/Characters
Real Places
Fictional Places
Important Events
Awards and Honors