Spotlight: Michael Chabon at Benaroya Tonight

Michael Chabon writes in practically every form he can get his hands on: literary, film, essays and even comics. He creates new breeds of literary expression that toy with genre while focusing on emotion.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, perhaps his most famous work, follows the experiences of two comic book creators in and after World War II in a mix of imagined and true history. His other seminal work, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which explores an alternate history in which Alaska rather than Israel is home to a Jewish metropolis, is a sci-fi mystery that investigates the Jewish identity.

Fed on a “healthy diet of crap” from popular culture since he was a child, Chabon uses this background to bring life to emotionally introspective stories at once literary and populated with familiar character types and big payoffs. He takes “the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story” and enlivens it.

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