Manhood for Amateurs: The Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father, and Son [Paperback]

“Chabon has always been a magical prose stylist, adept at combining the sort of social and emotional detail found in Philip Roth’sGoodbye, Columbusstories with the metaphor-rich descriptions of John Updike and John Irving’s inventive sleight of hand. . . . As in his novels, he shifts gears easily between the comic and the melancholy, the whimsical and the serious, demonstrating once again his ability to write about the big subjects of love and memory and regret without falling prey to the Scylla and Charybdis of cynicism and sentimentality.”
— Michiko Kakutani,New York Times

“Wondrous, wise and beautiful.”
— David Kamp,New York Times Book Review

The bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author ofWerewolves in Their Youth, Wonderboys, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, andThe Yiddish Policemen’s UnionMichael Chabon “takes [his] brutally observant, unfailingly honest, marvelously human gaze and turns it on his own life” (Time) in theNew York Timesbestselling memoirManhood for Amateurs.

A Best Book Of The Year

Time • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Kansas City Star San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • Seattle Times

A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces,Manhood for Amateursis the first sustained work of personal writing from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers addresses with his characteristic warmth and lyric wit the all-important question: What does it mean to be a man today?