It is life, with a dash of the fantastic. Whatever liberties have been taken…the reader is assured that they have been taken with due abandon.” Author and Pittsburgh native Michael Chabon. Chabon gleefully warns the reader of this in the preface to the novel, writing “I have stuck to facts except where facts refused to conform with memory, narrative purpose, or the truth as I prefer to understand it. Inspired by Chabon’s own deathbed visit to his grandfather in Oakland, California in the 1980s, the author blurs the line between autobiography and outlandish fiction so successfully that the reader has no idea what is true and what’s pure fantasy (although we can hazard a guess at times). Pulitzer Prize-winning author and Pittsburgh-native Michael Chabon’s latest novel is an absorbing fictional memoir that is based in large part based on a dying man’s recollections to his writer-grandson as he looks back on his life.
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