The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

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Michael Chabon

Graphic Novels

Jul 31, 2018

With The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon knocked one out of the park, and won a Pulitzer Prize to boot. The titular heroes are Joe Kavalier and Sammy Klayman (who changes his name to Clay), teenage Jewish cousins who share a love of drawing and a fascination with Harry Houdini. As he narrates the cousins’ rise to prominence, Chabon paints a wonderful portrait of the golden age of comics. At the same time, life outside the comics frame intersects with Kavalier and Clay’s fantastic world: There’s the war, the young men’s relationships, Joe’s concern for his family, the burgeoning of pop culture, the role of Jews within that, and even a golem. From Prague to Brooklyn and back again, Chabon’s imagination wraps us in the welcome embrace of a capacious and satisfying story. All of which means one needn’t be a comics aficionado to appreciate Chabon’s surprising, amusing, thought-provoking, language-rich, continent-spanning novel.

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