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Telegraph Avenue

ebook
1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
From Michael Chabon, the bestselling author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay; his first novel in 5 years is a lovingly painted pop-culture epic. One street in Oakland, California. As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are hanging in there, co-regents of Brokeland Records. Their wives, Gwen and Aviva, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives. When former star quarterback Gibson Goode announces plans to dump his latest Dogpile megastore on Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear the worst for their vulnerable little enterprise. As behind Goode's proposal a nefarious story lurks. While their husbands struggle to mount a defence, Aviva and Gwen find themselves caught up in a professional battle that tests the limits of their friendship. And into their already tangled lives comes Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged. An intimate epic set to the laidback beat of classic vinyl soul-jazz and pulsing with a virtuosic, pyrotechnical style all of its own, Telegraph Avenue is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet, and a must-read for fans of Nick Hornby's 'High Fidelity'.
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    • Publisher's Weekly

      May 28, 2012
      Virtuosity” is the word most commonly associated with Chabon, and if Telegraph Avenue, the latest from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is at first glance less conceptual than its predecessors, the sentences are no less remarkable. Set during the Bush/Kerry election, in Chabon’s home of Berkeley, Calif., it follows the flagging fortunes of Brokeland Records, a vintage record store on the titular block run by Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, currently threatened with closure by Pittsburgh Steeler’s quarterback-turned-entrepreneur Gibson “G Bad” Goode’s plans to “restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood” with one of his Dogpile “Thang” emporiums. The community mobilizes and confronts this challenge to the relative racial harmony enjoyed by the white Jaffe; his gay Tarantino-enthusiast son, Julie; and the African-American Archy, whose partner, Gwen Shanks, is not only pregnant but finds the midwife business she runs with Aviva, Jaffe’s wife, in legal trouble following a botched delivery. Making matters worse is Stallings’s father, Luther, a faded blaxploitation movie star with a Black Panther past, and the appearance of Titus, the son Archy didn’t know he had. All the elements of a socially progressive contemporary novel are in place, but Chabon’s preference for retro—the reader is seldom a page away from a reference to Marvel comics, kung fu movies, or a coveted piece of ’70s vinyl—quickly wears out its welcome. Worse, Chabon’s approach to race is surprisingly short on nuance and marred by a goofy cameo from a certain charismatic senator from Illinois. 15-city author tour. Agent: Mary Evans.

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  • OverDrive Read
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Languages

  • English

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