Search Worlds Without End

Two wandering adventurers and unlikely soulmates are variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves and con artists - until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles that follow a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars.

A series of essays and reviews on and of genre fiction by Michael Chabon.

Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, has joined forces with the editors of McSweeney's Quarterly Concern to create a collection of action-packed short stories by some of today's most talented names in literature. Elmore Leonard's telling of life for a fifteen-year-old boy and his dad in 1920's Oklahoma in "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman" shifts easily to the happenings of an adolescent's unexpected run-in with the future in Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium." In these and other stories, including Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick," Michael Crichton's "Blood Doesn't Come Out," "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly" by Dave Eggers, Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That" (read by Harlan Ellison, himself), Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes," and "The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance" by Michael Chabon, the authors return to the traditions of pulp fiction, spinning adventurous, suspense-ridden tales destined to keep their audience on the edges of their seats.

Table of Contents:

• The Editor's Notebook - (2003) - essay by Michael Chabon
• Tedford and the Megalodon - (2003) - shortstory by Jim Shepard
• The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter - (2003) - shortstory by Glen David Gold
• The Bees - shortstory by Dan Chaon
• Catskin - (2003) - shortstory by Kelly Link
• How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman - (2003) - shortstory by Elmore Leonard
• The General - (2003) - shortstory by Carol Emshwiller
• Closing Time - (2003) - shortstory by Neil Gaiman
• Otherwise Pandemonium - (2003) - shortstory by Nick Hornby
• The Tale of Gray Dick - (2003) - shortstory by Stephen King
• Blood Doesn't Come Out - (2003) - shortstory by Michael Crichton
• Weaving the Dark - (2003) - shortstory by Laurie R. King
• Chuck's Bucket - (2003) - shortstory by Chris Offutt
• Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly - (2003) - shortstory by Dave Eggers
• The Case of the Nazi Canary - (2003) - shortstory by Michael Moorcock
• The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers - (2003) - shortstory by Aimee Bender
• Ghost Dance - (2003) - shortstory by Sherman Alexie
• Goodbye to All That - (2003) - shortstory by Harlan Ellison
• Private Grave 9 - (2003) - shortstory by Karen Joy Fowler
• The Albertine Notes - (2003) - novella by Rick Moody
• The Martian Agent, A Planetary Romance - (2003) - novelette by Michael Chabon
• About the Contributors - (2003) - essay by Michael Chabon
• This Book Benefits 826 Valencia - (2003) - essay by Dave Eggers and Michael Chabon

Ethan Feld is bad at baseball. Hopeless, even. But when his father mysteriously disappears, Ethan is recruited to save him and the world by traveling the baseball-obsessed Summerlands to stop Coyote, the trickster, from unmaking existence. With help from a ragtag group of friends he meets along the way, Ethan must not only find his father and stop Coyote, but also master his position on the field. Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon has created a distinctly American fantasy experience with baseball at its heart.

With this brilliant novel, the bestselling author of The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and Wonder Boys gives us an exhilarating triumph of language and invention, a stunning novel in which the tragicomic adventures of a couple of boy geniuses reveal much about what happened to America in the middle of the twentieth century. Like Phillip Roth's American Pastoral or Don DeLillo's Underworld, Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a superb novel with epic sweep, spanning continents and eras, a masterwork by one of America's finest writers.

It is New York City in 1939. Joe Kavalier, a young artist who has also been trained in the art of Houdini-esque escape, has just pulled off his greatest feat to date: smuggling himself out of Nazi-occupied Prague. He is looking to make big money, fast, so that he can bring his family to freedom. His cousin, Brooklyn's own Sammy Clay, is looking for a collaborator to create the heroes, stories, and art for the latest novelty to hit the American dreamscape: the comic book. Out of their fantasies, fears, and dreams, Joe and Sammy weave the legend of that unforgettable champion the Escapist. And inspired by the beautiful and elusive Rosa Saks, a woman who will be linked to both men by powerful ties of desire, love, and shame, they create the otherworldly mistress of the night, Luna Moth. As the shadow of Hitler falls across Europe and the world, the Golden Age of comic books has begun.

The brilliant writing that has led critics to compare Michael Chabon to John Cheever and Vladimir Nabokov is everywhere apparent in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Chabon writes "like a magical spider, effortlessly spinning out elaborate webs of words that ensnare the reader," wrote Michiko Kakutani of The New York Times about Wonder Boys, and here he has created, in Joe Kavalier, a hero for the century.

For sixty years, Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of revelations of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. Proud, grateful, and longing to be American, the Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant, gritty, soulful, and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. For sixty years they have been left alone, neglected and half-forgotten in a backwater of history. Now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end: once again the tides of history threaten to sweep them up and carry them off into the unknown.

But homicide detective Meyer Landsman of the District Police has enough problems without worrying about the upcoming Reversion. His life is a shambles, his marriage a wreck, his career a disaster. He and his half-Tlingit partner, Berko Shemets, can't catch a break in any of their outstanding cases. Landsman's new supervisor is the love of his lifeand also his worst nightmare. And in the cheap hotel where he has washed up, someone has just committed a murderright under Landsman's nose. Out of habit, obligation, and a mysterious sense that it somehow offers him a shot at redeeming himself, Landsman begins to investigate the killing of his neighbor, a former chess prodigy. But when word comes down from on high that the case is to be dropped immediately, Landsman soon finds himself contending with all the powerful forces of faith, obsession, hopefulness, evil, and salvation that are his heritageand with the unfinished business of his marriage to Bina Gelbfish, the one person who understands his darkest fears.

At once a gripping whodunit, a love story, an homage to 1940s noir, and an exploration of the mysteries of exile and redemption, The Yiddish Policemen's Union is a novel only Michael Chabon could have written.