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2014 Longlist

Telegraph Avenue

ABOUT
THE BOOK

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there-longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, two semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart-half tavern, half temple-stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples’ already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of fifteen-year-old Julius Jaffe’s life.

An intimate epic, a NorCal Middlemarch set to the funky beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all its own, Telegraph Avenue is the great American novel we’ve been waiting for. Generous, imaginative, funny, moving, thrilling, humane, triumphant, it is Michael Chabon’s most dazzling book yet.

 

 

ABOUT
THE AUTHOR Michael
Chabon

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Summerland, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps and Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man.

He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, A Model World, Wonder Boys, Werewolves in their Youth, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Summerland, The Final Solution, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, Maps and Legends, Gentlemen of the Road, Telegraph Avenue, Moonglow, and the picture book The Astonishing Secret of Awesome Man.

He lives in Berkeley, California with his wife, the novelist Ayelet Waldman, and their children.

NOMINATING LIBRARY COMMENTS

Character-driven, culture-rich, and amusement-park-bold. Telegraph Avenue tells of the existential trials and transcendent friendship of two Los Angeles families. Chabon’s virtuoso writing, which in less capable hands might assault the senses, makes it impossible to put this book down.

In a prose jazz composition of many layers and connections, master storyteller Chabon constructs a tale of urban development, popular culture, change, dreams and relationships set in cities across the bay from San Francisco.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Date published
10/09/2013
Country
United States
Original Language
English
Publisher
Harper Collins

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