Author Michael Chabon is the subject of “A Life in Books” in the 6 April 2009 issue of Newsweek. As readers of the regular feature know, there is a brief bio of the featured person along with a photo, and then he lists “My Five Most Important Books” along with a sentence explaining why each made the list. Chabon’s five include: Complete Stories of Edgar Allan Poe; Ray Bradbury’s R is for Rocket; Collected Stories of John Cheever; Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes this World; and Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez. Chabon also offers a classic he revisited with disappointment (Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men) and a book to which he always returns (Moby Dick).
Chabon won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, and most recently published The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which won the Hugo and Nebula awards. The motion picture version of his first book, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (published in 1988) will debut in theatres on 4 April.