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Michael Chabon
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay Audio CD – CD, August 20, 2013

by Michael Chabon (Author), David Colacci (Reader)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,998 ratings
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WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE

The beloved, award-winning The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Michael Chabon masterwork, is the American epic of two boy geniuses named Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay. Now with special bonus material by Michael Chabon.

A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize

Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Named one of the 10 Best Books of the Decade by Entertainment Weekly

Previous page
  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    Brilliance Audio
  3. Publication date
    August 20, 2013
  4. Dimensions
    5 x 0.75 x 5.5 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1480537209
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1480537200
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Michael Chabon is the author of Wonder Boys, which won universal critical acclaim and was made into a feature film starring Michael Douglas. Entertainment Weekly included his latest, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, on its list of the best books of 2000. Both are available from Brilliance Audio. He received his B.A. from The University of Pittsburgh and his M.F.A. from the University of California at Irvine. He lives with his wife and two children in California.

For nearly twenty years, David Colacci has recorded audiobooks around his busy schedule in regional theater as an actor, a director and as Artistic Director of Hope Summer Repertory Theater in Holland, Michigan. David has recorded more than 70 audiobooks, which include mystery and suspense, science fiction and fantasy, and literary works. He is married to Susan Ericksen, who also narrates for Brilliance Audio.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Brilliance Audio; Abridged edition (August 20, 2013)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1480537209
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1480537200
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 6.1 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5 x 0.75 x 5.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 4,998 ratings

About the author

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Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon

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Michael Chabon is the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of seven novels – including The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay and The Yiddish Policemen's Union – two collections of short stories, and one other work of non-fiction. He lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife and children.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
4,998 global ratings
A True Fictional Period Piece
4 Stars
A True Fictional Period Piece
The story eclipsed ten years in the lives of two Jewish cousins who took a stab at the comic book business in its infancy during the Golden Age, and had their lives change from the events of Pearl Harbor. Stan Lee even made a cameo, which is awesome because he's in everything...
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Top reviews from the United States

Sally E. McAfee
5.0 out of 5 stars This is for the book The Amazing Adventures of Cavalier and Clay
Reviewed in the United States on April 26, 2024
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Excellent writing, use of metaphors, and command of the English language. Much about writing Comic books and the historical period around WWII that I didn't know. It is quite long but was worth the read.
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Sebastian R
4.0 out of 5 stars Good novel
Reviewed in the United States on February 28, 2024
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Overall good story, nice prose, robust utility of rich vocabulary. There are scenes and elements of homosexuality. The writer is gay, which I leaned after I read some of the book and decided to research the author. I couldn’t continue due to gay scenes in the book.
2 people found this helpful
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Phred
5.0 out of 5 stars Surprises, history, adventure, heartfelt emotions and Comic Books!
Reviewed in the United States on April 8, 2017
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Bottom Line First: Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Paperback, Picador edition) is one of the best books I have read in years. That statement and the 5 stars insure that many review readers will never see this review. Then again the mere fact that it is a Pulitzer Prize winning novel will keep some folks from considering it. Their loss. Chabon has grasped what it is about the comic book and the pre-World War II era when the industry emblazoned its men in tights into the culture of America. The publishers tended to be a shady bunch and the artists and writers were as obscure as any collection of the nerdy, edge of society types drawn from American depression families and European political refugees. One may reasonably argue that the comic book and Jazz are coequal American Art forms. Chabon gets this notion and enrobes it in a complex, human and magical story. The Amazing Adventures is relatively discrete in it use of language, violence and sex, but the more sensitive reader may want to consider that all of these topics, plus politics are part of the story telling.

At whatever risk there are two major thoughts that will come back and drive this novel: Concentrate on what you are escaping toward, not what you are escaping from. And The Escapist cannot not fly.

Author Michael Chabon anchors the history of the comic book in a few concepts. The progenitor of Superman, the first of the super heroes in another creature of imagination, created by an earlier generation of preyed upon Jews, The Golem. Following this argument he personifies the history of this entertainment cum art form in the persons of American hustler and writer Sammy Clay and his cousin Jewish refugee artist Joe Kavalier. Sammy is just another New York Jew with a story that will be told in small reveals. He is like many Americans looking for that one break that will place him and his family beyond material want. Sammy has a complex history including training as an escape artist, magician and the first family member to escape from Hitler. Escape will be a word that will be a key to his life.

Early in the book they create their super hero the Escapist. A costumed avenger with the special mission to “perform amazing feats and coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny's chains.” They will create more characters and in so doing tell the story of much of the rise of the comic industry.

About half way into the book this plot line wears thin. This is when the Chabon magic happens. All of publishing stops being important. The entire plot shift to the adventure of living. Cavalier, Clay and Rosa Saks the female character…
Major point: Rosa is not just the love interest or the common inspiration. She is a third figure, but a character in her own right who demands respect for her role not just as an inspiration to the main two, but as a person with her heroics and weaknesses. Rosa makes her own sacrifices and mistakes. She is second fiddle in the strictest sense, but she is a lot more.

Returning to the second half of the book. Chabon presents us with the Amazing adventures of living. There is a war to be won, but it is a personal war, not one of big battles and hand to hand fighting. There is a small technical error that has a German firing a .45 instead of a Lugar, but never mind. Mostly the heroic adventures are about raising a family, continuing after success and money and coming to terms with the guilt of surviving.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is filled with asides, and deliberate diversions from the main plot. Non-issues inserted just to make you the more ready for the plot to resume. Chabon makes these techniques work. He is doing with literature what the magicians and serial comic book writers do to build suspense and fill out the panels. The magic is in the author’s ability to do in the narrative what he admires in his characters.
21 people found this helpful
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Joshua G. Feldman
5.0 out of 5 stars Shazam - Genius - an Encyclopedia of how men love.
Reviewed in the United States on August 24, 2007
Verified Purchase
It's been years since I've been as powerfully affected by a novel as I have been by Michael Chabon's Kavalier & Clay. Chabon is a virtuoso. The book is full of discrete vignettes, distinct and perfect as cut gemstones. Riveting, humorous, human, and thematically consistent and resonant - these scenes mesh and build and reflect with dazzling skill. When I first picked it up I couldn't understand - "Pulitzer Prize for a book about a couple of kids who write comic books?" Having read it - now I know. Chabon's amazing skill vividly illuminates New York city of the 30s and 40s and evokes the vanished world of immigrant Jews, the birth of comic books, the horror of the holocaust, as well as delineates the aching expanses of the human heart. Chabon's ability to situate you in place and time is astonishing - as his ability to make characters with depth and penetrating realism. Part of this incredible ability to project depth is his eye for detail. Just like "Moby Dick" teaches you tangentially about whaling and nineteenth century nautical technology this book schools you in such diverse subjects as Golems, Antarctic exploration, shortwave radio, magician's culture, locks, escape tricks, Prague, comic book culture & lore, surrealist art, New York geography and culture and the 1939 world's fair. It's larger than life - but feels incredibly real.

But far more than detail - this book's heart is about the many different ways men love; from moving mountains to fulfill a promise, all the way to casual rape. We see men loving family, women, men, art, a dog, a son, men loving pieces of equipment (particularly one loving a radio and another an airplane), etc... We see the stupidity and the wisdom - all the human frailty; and incredible resiliency and strength. It's funny - while reading the focus seems more on the pain - but in the end it's the love and connection that breaks your heart. For all its tragic content, this book is incredibly light and hopeful - and funny. There are a bunch of laugh out loud interludes. This is a wise, human, funny and ultimately kind book.

This is, indeed, a story about a couple of kids who create comic books in the late 30s - but it is far more. It is a story of the American dream; a whiz bang novel worthy of the moniker "Great American Novel". Art, fantasy, love, loss, redemption, and life interweave through this story in a distinctly American way that is beautiful, exhilerating, heartbreaking, and ultimately uplifting. This book makes me want to live - and more than any book in recent memory, this book makes want to write. I only wish I could write with this kind of verve and skill. I give this book my highest recommendation.
7 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

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Wade Stillman
5.0 out of 5 stars Great writer, great book
Reviewed in Canada on January 25, 2024
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Lovely volume of this authors book. Great story, excellent writer.
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Word Smith
5.0 out of 5 stars Speedy delivery
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 8, 2024
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Excellent book in good nick!
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Berenice R
5.0 out of 5 stars Muy buen libro
Reviewed in Mexico on November 23, 2019
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Llego a tiempo y en buen estado y esta divertida la novela :)
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A used book obtained but in fantastic condition.
Reviewed in India on December 23, 2020
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Delivery on time. Packing was good taking care that the book wasn’t folded or creased. The quality of this used book is also good.
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Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars A used book obtained but in fantastic condition.
Reviewed in India on December 23, 2020
Delivery on time. Packing was good taking care that the book wasn’t folded or creased. The quality of this used book is also good.
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One person found this helpful
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Sonia
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful
Reviewed in France on April 4, 2019
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Such a poetic book, the author writes so lyrically that you want to read some passages out loud. I really enjoyed the typography that was custom-made for the book. A nice, thoughtful touch
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