Manhood For Amateurs

A shy manifesto an impractical handbook the true story of a fabulist an entire life in parts and pieces Manhood for Amateurs is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful provocative slyly interlinked essays one of America’s most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections regrets and re-examinations each sparked by an encounter in the present that holds some legacy of the past.What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us with characteristic warmth and lyric wit the personal and family history that haunts him even as―simply because―it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son as a passionate husband and above all as the father of four young Americans Chabon renders his memories of childhood of his parents’ marriage and divorce of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth as a theme played―on different instruments with a fresh tempo and in a new key―by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling hilarious and moving Manhood for Amateurs is destined to become a classic