《Moonglow》

Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us

In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain in the ongoing magic act that is the art of Michael Chabon.

Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession, made to his grandson, of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and desire and ordinary love, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at mid-century and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of the keeping of secrets and the telling of lies. A gripping, poignant, tragicomic, scrupulously researched and wholly imaginary transcript of a life that spanned the dark heart of the twentieth century, Moonglow is also a tour de force of speculative history in which Chabon attempts to reconstruct the mysterious origins and fate of Chabon Scientific, Co., an authentic mail-order novelty company whose ads for scale models of human skeletons, combustion engines and space rockets were once a fixture in the back pages of Esquire, Popular Mechanics, and Boy’s Life. Along the way Chabon devises and reveals, in bits and pieces whose hallucinatory intensity is matched only by their comic vigor and the radiant moonglow of his prose, a secret history of his own imagination.

From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill Prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of “the American Century,” Moonglow collapses an era into a single life and a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional non-fiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most daring, his most moving, his most Chabonesque.

迈克尔·夏邦（Michael Chabon），当代美国作家，被誉为“塞林格的接班人”。1963年生于华盛顿特区犹太裔家庭，先后就读于卡内基-梅隆大学和匹兹堡大学，并在加州大学欧文分校获得创意写作硕士学位。夏邦集普利策小说奖得主，星云、雨果、轨迹、侧面四项科幻大奖得主，好莱坞编剧于一身，曾任电影《蜘蛛侠2》与《异星战场》的编剧。

第一部长篇小说《匹兹堡的秘密》（The Mysteries of Pittsburgh）创下当时新人小说作品的最高预付版税纪录，1988年出版后，在《纽约时报》排行榜上连续停留十二周。1992年，夏邦出版第一部小说集《大千世界》（A Model World），收录了发表于《纽约客》等刊物上的短篇作品。随后《奇迹小子》（Wonder Boys）的出版，确立了夏邦在美国文坛的地位。2000年出版的小说《卡瓦利与克雷的神奇冒险》（The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay）于次年摘得普利策小说奖，并入围美国笔会福克纳小说奖、全美书评人协会奖和《洛杉矶时报》图书奖。夏邦出版了科幻长篇《犹太警察工会》（The Yiddish Policemen's Union），一举夺下四项科幻大奖。2016年底，讲述大时代背景下犹太家庭回忆的《月光狂想曲》（Moonglow）出版，获得由美国图书馆联合会颁发以表彰年度犹太文学的索菲·布罗迪奖章。