A Model World
And Other Stories
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4.0 • 21 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
A story collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, “one of his generation’s most eloquent new voices” (The New York Times).
With his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon announced his presence as a literary wunderkind of style and substance. A Model World and Other Stories only burnished his reputation as a distinctive prose stylist.
In eleven elegant tales—some of them linked—by the New York Times–bestselling author of Telegraph Avenue and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s singular characters hold tight to private dreams even as their closest relationships crumble. Five stories follow an anxious adolescent from the beach vacation where he learns of his parents’ divorce to the confused days of a woefully misguided crush. Others find ex-lovers tormenting each other at an oceanside café, a washed-up professional baseball player attending a teammate’s funeral, and a Pittsburgh disc jockey still pining for a woman who married him to get her American citizenship.
“Chabon moves across powerful emotional ground with certainty and delicacy,” raves the Chicago Tribune. “There are heartbreaking moments in these stories, but they are rendered so precisely, through incidents that capture the subtlest of feelings, that the reader can only smile at Chabon’s skill.” This ebook features a biography of the author.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
An exceptional collection of short stories follows Chabon's well received debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh . These subtly ironic tales have a brevity and clarity that allows Chabon's bittersweet observations to hit home. Understatement is Chabon's talent; using words economically, he deftly creates believable situations made remarkable by underlying twists of motivation and behavior. His vivid characters share the need to feel accepted and loved by others. In ``S Angel'' Ira, a drama student at UCLA, attends his favorite cousin Sheila's wedding and falls for a party guest named Carmen--an abrasive, unstable woman who is unresponsive to his flirtations. It's as much a surprise to the reader as to Ira when he realizes his true affections for Sheila. The unpredictability of love surfaces again in the dryly witty ``Ocean Avenue,'' in which Bobby Lazar, an architect in Laguna Beach, runs into his ex-lover, Suzette, a painfully thin exercise fanatic, and finds he can't suppress his indefinable feelings for her, despite the chaos they bring to each other's lives. Chabon's characters manage to find joy amidst disappointment, and thus a sense of purpose.
