A Model World and Other Stories

By the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. A Model World and Other Stories Michael Chabon. Critics called Michael Chabon's first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, ‘astonishing’, ‘remarkable’, ‘bright, funny’, ‘daring, vivid, exciting’, ‘something close to genius’ and ‘a lovely darting apparition’. The novel spent seven weeks on the New York Times best-seller list. In the two years since, nine of Chabon’s stories have appeared in The New Yorker. A Model World is Michael Chabon’s first book since The Mysteries of Pittsburgh. While they are wonderfully diverse and unexpected, these stories share a wry sense of whimsy, an intellectual depth, and the glittering languages that has become Chabon’s hallmark (‘Chabon writes beautiful sentences – scrupulously crafted, yet retaining an easy, colloquial vitality.’ They show us people who attempt to create and inhabit their own model worlds, only to watch them collapse in the face of the real world. In ‘S ANGEL’, a group of wedding guests is hijacked by fast-talking real-estate agent, but not before the bride herself disappears. ‘Millionaires’ gives us a trio of lovers mystified by buried treasure. ‘Smoke’ takes us to a baseball catcher’s funeral, where one of the mourners, a has-been pitcher, confronts the ruins of his career. In the hilarious title story, a graduate student plagiarizes a dissertation on the movement of clouds, only to find himself and his faculty adviser in a parlor game where each player must confess the worst thing he or she has ever done. The second part of the book, ‘The Lost World’, is a series of stories about a young boy, Nathan Shapiro, who must face the wrenching emotions caused by his parents’ bitter divorce. A Modern World and Other Stories shows us the further unfolding of Michael Chabon’s art, which Alice McDermott characterized in The New York Times Book Review as ‘the voice of a young writer with tremendous skill, as he discovers, joyously, just what his words can do.’