Items related to Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands - Softcover

  • 3.69 out of 5 stars
    4,274 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780061650925: Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Synopsis

Maps and Legends is an essay collection by American author Michael Chabon that was scheduled for official release on May 1, 2008, although some copies shipped two weeks early from various online bookstores. The book is Chabon's first book-length foray into nonfiction, with 16 essays, some previously published.[1] Several of these essays are defenses of the author's work in genre literature (such as science fiction, fantasy, and comics), while others are more autobiographical, explaining how the author came to write several of his most popular works.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Moonglow and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, among many others. He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

From the Back Cover

Maps and Legends is an essay collection by American author Michael Chabon that was scheduled for official release on May 1, 2008, although some copies shipped two weeks early from various online bookstores. The book is Chabon's first book-length foray into nonfiction, with 16 essays, some previously published.[1] Several of these essays are defenses of the author's work in genre literature (such as science fiction, fantasy, and comics), while others are more autobiographical, explaining how the author came to write several of his most popular works.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Maps and Legends

Reading and Writing Along the BorderlandsBy Michael Chabon

HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.

Copyright © 2009 Michael Chabon
All right reserved.

ISBN: 9780061650925

Chapter One

Trickster in a suit of lights

Thoughts on the modern short story

Entertainment has a bad name. Serious people learn to mistrust and even to revile it. The word wears spandex, pasties, a leisure suit studded with blinking lights. It gives off a whiff of Coppertone and dripping Creamsicle, the fake-butter miasma of a movie-house lobby, of karaoke and Jägermeister, Jerry Bruckheimer movies, a Street Fighter machine grunting solipsistically in a corner of an ice-rink arcade. Entertainment trades in cliché and product placement. It engages regions of the brain far from the centers of discernment, critical thinking, ontological speculation. It skirts the black heart of life and drowns life's lambency in a halogen glare. Intelligent people must keep a certain distance from its productions. They must handle the things that entertain them with gloves of irony and postmodern tongs. Entertainment, in short, means junk, and too much junk is bad for you—bad for your heart, your arteries, your mind, your soul.

But maybe these intelligent and serious people, my faithful straw men, are wrong. Maybe the reason for the junkiness of so much of what pretends to entertain us is that we have accepted—indeed, we have helped to articulate—such a narrow, debased concept of entertainment. The brain is an organ of entertainment, sensitive at any depth, and over a wide spectrum. But we have learned to mistrust and despise our human aptitude for being entertained, and in that sense we get the entertainment we deserve.

I'd like to believe that, because I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period. Oh, I could decoct a brew of other, more impressive motivations and explanations. I could uncork some stuff about reader response theory, or the Lacanian parole. I could go on about the storytelling impulse and the need to make sense of experience through story. A spritz of Jung might scent the air. I could adduce Kafka's formula: "A book must be an ice-axe to break the seas frozen inside our soul." I could go down to the café at the local mega-bookstore and take some wise words of Abelard or Koestler about the power of literature off a mug. But in the end—here's my point—it would still all boil down to entertainment, and its suave henchman, pleasure. Because when the axe bites the ice, you feel an answering throb of delight all the way from your hands to your shoulders, and the blade tolls like a bell for miles.

Therefore I would like to propose expanding our def?inition of entertainment to encompass everything pleasurable that arises from the encounter of an attentive mind with a page of literature.

Here is a sample, chosen at random from my career as a reader, of encounters that would be covered under my new def?inition of entertainment: the engagement of the interior ear by the rhythm and pitch of a f?ine prose style; the dawning awareness that giant mutant rat people dwell in the walls of a ruined abbey in England; two hours spent bushwhacking through a densely packed argument about the structures of power as embodied in nineteenth-century prison architecture; the consummation of a great love aboard a lost Amazon riverboat, or in Elizabethan slang; the intricate fractal patterning of motif and metaphor in Nabokov and Neil Gaiman's Sandman; stories of pirates, zeppelins, sinister children; a thousand-word-long sentence comparing homosexuals to the Jews in a page of Proust (vol. 3); a duel to the death with broadswords on the seacoast of ancient Zingara; the outrageousness of whale slaughter or human slaughter in Melville or McCarthy; the outrageousness of Dr. Charles Bovary's clubfoot-correcting device; the outrageousness of outrage in a page of Philip Roth; words written in smoke across the sky of London on a day in June 1923; a momentary gain in one's own sense of shared despair, shared nullity, shared rapture, shared loneliness, shared broken-hearted glee; the recounting of a portentous birth, a disastrous wedding, or a midnight deathwatch on the Neva.

The original sense of the word "entertainment" is a lovely one of mutual support through intertwining, like a pair of trees grown together, interwoven, each sustaining and bearing up the other. It suggests a kind of midair transfer of strength, contact across a void, like the tangling of cable and steel between two lonely bridgeheads. I can't think of a better approximation of the relation between reader and writer. Derived senses of fruitful exchange, of reciprocal sustenance, of welcome offered, of grasp and interrelationship, of a slender span of bilateral attention along which things are given and received, still animate the word in its verb form: we entertain visitors, guests, ideas, prospects, theories, doubts, and grudges.

At some point, inevitably, as generations of hosts entertained generations of guests with banquets and feasts and displays of artif?ice, the idea of pleasure seeped into the pores of the word. And along with pleasure (just as inevitably, I suppose) came disapproval, a sense of hollowness and hangover, the saturnine doubtfulness that attaches to delight and artif?ice and show: to pleasure, that ambiguous gift. It's partly the doubtfulness of pleasure that taints the name of entertainment. Pleasure is unreliable and transient. Pleasure is Lucy with the football. Pleasure is easily synthesized, mass-produced, individually wrapped. Its benef?its do not endure, and so we come to mistrust them, or our taste for them.



Continues...
Excerpted from Maps and Legendsby Michael Chabon Copyright © 2009 by Michael Chabon. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherHarper Perennial
  • Publication date2009
  • ISBN 10 0061650927
  • ISBN 13 9780061650925
  • BindingPaperback
  • LanguageEnglish
  • Number of pages210
  • Rating
    • 3.69 out of 5 stars
      4,274 ratings by Goodreads

Buy Used

Condition: Good
Ship within 24hrs. Satisfaction...
View this item

FREE shipping within U.S.A.

Destination, rates & speeds

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

Search results for Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Paperback

Seller: BooksRun, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Paperback. Condition: Good. Reprint. Ship within 24hrs. Satisfaction 100% guaranteed. APO/FPO addresses supported. Seller Inventory # 0061650927-11-1

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.20
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Paperback

Seller: BooksRun, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Paperback. Condition: Fair. Reprint. Ship within 24hrs. Satisfaction 100% guaranteed. APO/FPO addresses supported. Seller Inventory # 0061650927-7-1

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.20
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00072741585

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.78
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 3 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Item in very good condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00085793379

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.78
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Softcover

Seller: SecondSale, Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Acceptable. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00067128090

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.78
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used paperback

Seller: Your Online Bookstore, Houston, TX, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

paperback. Condition: Good. Seller Inventory # 0061650927-3-30132142

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.80
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used paperback

Seller: Jenson Books Inc, Logan, UT, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

paperback. Condition: Very Good. A well-cared-for item that has seen limited use but remains in great condition. The item is complete, unmarked, and undamaged, but may show some limited signs of wear. Item works perfectly. Pages are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting. The spine is undamaged. Seller Inventory # 4BQM1A005PWC_ns

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 3.95
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Softcover

Seller: More Than Words, Waltham, MA, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. . . All orders guaranteed and ship within 24 hours. Before placing your order for please contact us for confirmation on the book's binding. Check out our other listings to add to your order for discounted shipping. Seller Inventory # WAL-J-2g-002463

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 1.00
Convert currency
Shipping: US$ 3.99
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used paperback

Seller: Once Upon A Time Books, Siloam Springs, AR, U.S.A.

Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars 4-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

paperback. Condition: Good. This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear . This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear . Seller Inventory # mon0001074172

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 1.78
Convert currency
Shipping: US$ 3.95
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

Stock Image

Chabon, Michael
Published by Harper Perennial, 2009
ISBN 10: 0061650927 ISBN 13: 9780061650925
Used Softcover

Seller: Wonder Book, Frederick, MD, U.S.A.

Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars 5-star rating, Learn more about seller ratings

Condition: Very Good. Very Good condition. A copy that may have a few cosmetic defects. May also contain a few markings such as an owner's name, short gifter's inscription or light stamp. Seller Inventory # I27G-00039

Contact seller

Buy Used

US$ 5.79
Convert currency
Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds

Quantity: 1 available

Add to basket

There are 55 more copies of this book

View all search results for this book