Telegraph Avenue A Novel [Paperback]

TheNew York Timesbestseller, now available in paperback—a big-hearted, exhilarating novel exploring the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland families.

“An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist.”
—Michiko Kakutani,New York Times

New York Timesbestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures ofKavalier & Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemen’s Union); to discoverThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us toTelegraph Avenuein a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. InTelegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop culture—Kung Fu, ’70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul music—and delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there—longtime friends, bandmates, and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semi-legendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart—half tavern, half temple—stands Brokeland.

When ex–NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. MelƒÐ