Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon lives and works in Berkeley and Los Angeles. (September 2019)

Morris Ernst (second from left) defending Gustave Flaubert’s November in court against charges of obscenity, New York City, 1935

‘Ulysses’ on Trial

The target was United States anti-obscenity law. The bait was a single copy of an English-language novel, the most notorious book in the world.

September 26, 2019 issue

Letter

Stephan Landsman

Morris Ernst, Bennett Cerf, and ‘Ulysses’

October 24, 2019 issue

Remembering Bob Silvers

On the late editor of The New York Review

March 21, 2017

Tanya Holland’s West Oakland restaurant Brown Sugar Kitchen

Soul Pleasure

November 6, 2014 issue

Letter

Stephen Hassett

Laurel in Oakland

January 8, 2015 issue

A diner looking across the Hudson River and New Jersey from Windows on the World, the restaurant at the top of the north tower of the World Trade Center, June 1996

The Crying of September 11

Thomas Pynchon’s ‘Bleeding Edge’

Bleeding Edge

by Thomas Pynchon

November 7, 2013 issue

Let It Rock

July 11, 2013 issue

Kara Hayward (center) in Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom, in a scene showing preparations for a production of Benjamin Britten’s opera Noye’s Fludde

The Film Worlds of Wes Anderson

March 7, 2013 issue

Wes Anderson’s Worlds

From Rushmore to Moonrise Kingdom (shamefully neglected by this year’s Academy voters), Wes Anderson’s films readily, even eagerly, concede the “miniature” quality of the worlds he builds.

January 31, 2013

Head or Tale

September 27, 2012 issue

On the Vico Road

September 27, 2012 issue

What to Make of Finnegans Wake?

July 12, 2012 issue

Letter

Peter D'Epiro

On the Vico Road

September 27, 2012 issue

An image from Winsor McCay's Little Nemo in Slumberland

Why I Hate Dreams

I hate dreams. Dreams are the Sea Monkeys of consciousness: in the back pages of sleep they promise us teeming submarine palaces but leave us, on waking, with a hermetic residue of freeze-dried dust. The wisdom of dreams is a fortune on paper that you can’t cash out, an oasis of shimmering water that turns, when you wake up, to a mouthful of sand. I hate them for their absurdities and deferrals, their endlessly broken promise to amount to something, by and by. I hate them for the way they ransack memory, jumbling treasure and trash. I hate them for their tedium, how they drag on, peter out, wander off.

June 15, 2012

Milo approaching the tollbooth in his bedroom; illustration by Jules Feiffer from Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth

On ‘The Phantom Tollbooth’

June 9, 2011 issue

Milo and Tock, from The Phantom Tollbooth

On 'The Phantom Tollbooth'

When I was a boy I read, in a biography of Daniel Boone, or of Daniel Beard, that young Dan (whichever of the two it may have been—or maybe it was young George Washington) had so loved some book, had felt his heart and mind inscribed so deeply in its every line, that he had pricked his fingertip with a knife and, using a pen nib and his blood for ink, penned his name on the flyleaf. At once, reading that, I knew two things: 1) I must at once undertake the same procedure and 2) only one, among all the books I adored and treasured, was worthy of such tribute: *The Phantom Tollbooth*. At that point I had read it at least five or six times.

April 21, 2011