Mr. Chabon. (Ulf Andersen/Getty Images)

Michael Chabon has made himself a literary champion of commercial pleasures. His fiction in recent years has touched the same nerve as nostalgic pop favorites: detective novels, comic books, kung fu movies, soul music. And with Mr. Chabon’s new novel, the retail romance Telegraph Avenue (Harper, 480 pp., $27.99), this principle reaches a certain literal endpoint. Not just old-fashioned commercial entertainment but old-fashioned commerce itself—the scrappy, cozy, locally owned sort—becomes the object of his underdog affection.

Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe, the book’s heroes, run a used record store in Berkeley called Brokeland, which offers “unlimited supplies of music and bullshit on tap.” It’s a den of colorful Telegraph Avenue idlers (one has a pet parrot; another, a lawyer nicknamed “Moby,” represents whales) and the store’s barely solvent owners have become the guardians of their own endangered species. “Brokeland Records was nearly the last of its kind,” Mr. Chabon writes. “Ishi, Chingachgook, Martha the passenger pigeon.” Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, wives to Archy and Nat, are also in business together: they “catch babies” as Berkeley Birth Partners. Aviva, we’re told, is “the Alice Waters of midwives,” which maybe makes Gwen a sous-chef with a nursing degree.

Telegraph Avenue transforms small-business ownership from a trusty American dream into a brand of idiosyncrasy by tucking it into what was once the bosom of ’60s counterculture. Gwen, Archy, Aviva and Nat are kindred spirits to the kind of geeked-out fanatic that Mr. Chabon has written of—and written of being—elsewhere. They weather the same sorts of delights and indignities: fits of fervor over their chosen niches, marginalization by establishment naysayers. And at the same time, they endure the trials of early middle age. Gwen is pregnant and Archy, ambivalent, is cheating on her. Nat and Aviva are facing the first hints of rebellion from their “sweet freakazoid” of a 15-year-old son, Julie; and Julie is nursing a crush on Titus, Archy’s illegitimate teenage son, whom Archy has never met. Archy’s own father, meanwhile, is using blackmail and city politics in an effort to revive his blaxploitation glory days as Willie Strutter, movie martial artist.

The book’s action is backdated to 2004, allowing for a little pre-recession nostalgia. Still, business isn’t easy: both Brokeland and Berkeley Birth Partners may be doomed. The main villain in all this does not seem, technically, to be a completely bad guy. Gibson “G Bad” Goode is a former star quarterback and the fifth-richest black man in America. He has parlayed his wealth and fame into an entertainment empire, and he wants to open one of his Dogpile Thang megastores right down the street from Brokeland. “Megastore” sounds ominous—but Goode’s Dogpile Thang is improbably high-minded and hard to hate. The proposed Thang will offer movies, books, and music with a focus on African-American culture; it will even sell used and rare vinyl. “The main idea of a Thang,” we’re told, “was not to make money but to restore, at a stroke, the commercial heart of a black neighborhood cut out during the glory days of freeway construction.” So this is a fairly rosy world. (There’s a Black Panther shooting, sure, but it seems surprisingly mundane and happens offstage.) If the stakes of his story do not always feel high, the author compensates by writing with prodigious energy.

Michael Chabon is a famous writer who hasn’t published a novel in five years, which means this book is an event, and Telegraph Avenue does not take eventfulness lightly. At every turn, verbal firecrackers go off, plot twists pile up like pie after turkey dinner, minor characters bear histories stuffed full as Christmas stockings. It’s a credit to Mr. Chabon that this mostly reads as exuberance rather than showboating, but either way, it gets exhausting. The reader ends up with the classic New Year’s Eve problem: few things are as boring as setting out to have a bunch of fun.

Mr. Chabon’s unstinting style gives the prose a kind of uniform chewiness. It forces the reader to proceed deliberately even when the story feels like it ought to be gulped down.  As the book reaches its climax, the teenage sons are on the run, their dads are in pursuit, the Oakland PD wants to talk to Nat, and Mr. Chabon describes an important phone call:

Little by little, Nat wound himself up, looping himself in yellow cord like a fork involving itself in a plate of spaghetti, Cleopatra sending herself to Caesar in a carpet. By the time his conversation with Archy was over and he went to hang up the phone, Nat had coiled himself all the way back to the kitchen and was as thoroughly tangled as Charlie Brown in a kite string.

The tangled imagery might be the point here, but this late in the game, 400 pages in, it’s hard to be sure. Three separate metaphors feel like Mr. Chabon’s standard equipment for describing a phone cord.

And his instinct for pleasing the reader occasionally crosses into excess. Barack Obama himself swoops in with an epiphany, a scene that reads uncomfortably like presidential fan fiction. Of course Obama is not yet a president (only a state senator) when he arrives to speak at the Kerry fundraiser where Nat and Archy’s band is playing. “Now, I would ask you to dance,” Obama tells a pregnant Gwen, “but I don’t think my wife would be happy if it got back to her that I was observed dancing with a gorgeous sister in your condition.” This is vaguely fun, but mostly it’s mortifying. The payoff, the dramatic irony—you know that guy’s gonna be president!—is cheap. Obama incarnates themes Mr. Chabon wants to explore: race, liberalism, dreams from one’s father. But the way he deploys the now-president makes him distracting rather than evocative.

Perhaps his setting is too idyllic to allow Mr. Chabon to really sink his teeth into a topic like race, anyway. Much of the present-day Bay Area manages to be extreme mainly in its pleasantness: it offers the comprehensive lifestyle equivalent of 72-degree weather. “Brokeland” refers to the Berkeley-Oakland borderland the record store occupies, which serves as a reminder of the area’s radical history and urban woes; Mr. Chabon has located a promising seam in Bay Area life, an opening tear into the soft world around him, where problems can feel like a thing of the past. In a different novel, this world’s easy, complacent charm would be a clear target for satire. But apart from some gentle fun at the expense of the Birth Partners’ clients, satire is not Mr. Chabon’s goal. The book predominantly represents an affectionate portrait of the place where the author has lived for the last 15 years. He considers his somewhat goofy hometown with the same care he gives his somewhat goofy characters and their somewhat goofy interests.

But Mr. Chabon’s feelings find a vessel in a crucial bit player, Mr. Nostalgia, proprietor of Mr. Nostalgia’s Neighborhood and purveyor of non-sports cards (ALF, Growing Pains and—most importantly—“Masters of Kung Fu”). Mr. Nostalgia is a man after the author’s heart when it comes to the melancholy pleasures of connoisseurship, and he offers what sounds like a modest half-apology for the book’s superabundance of bric-a-brac.

“Though Mr. Nostalgia loved the things he sold, he had no illusion that they held any intrinsic value,” Mr. Chabon writes. “They were worth only what you would pay for them; what small piece of everything you had ever lost that, you might come to believe, they would restore to you.”

editorial@observer.com

Not that his wife, the delightfully unfiltered Ayelet Waldman has ever held back about her marriage before.

[Read: The whole 'I love my husband more than my kids' episode, the 'My husband is skinny and I'm jealous/want to sex him' thing, and the 'My kids know in detail about how my husband used to sex men' moment, among others.]

But this may represent a new height in oversharing:

That said, anyone who actually has HPV talking about how they themselves received it, and the actual dangers of it—in light of the recent Republican appropriation of the issue (wherein an HPV vaccine, evil instrument of health care that it is, alchemizes into the threat of "mental retardation" to little girls everywhere at the hands of Michele Bachmann)—can't be a bad thing.

Also, anyone who has a strong enough marriage to survive one's spouse spontaneously outing the communicable disease virus shared by them in the relationship to, let's see, 5,791 people? Good on 'em.

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

The plot.

Ayelet Waldman and Michael Chabon are working on a musical about McSweeney's non-profit 826 Valencia's Superhero Supply Store in Park Slope. It's true, Ms. Waldman told us! It will be called The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. Michael Mayer, of American Idiot and Spring Awakening will direct; Peter Lerman, a young up-and-coming musical talent, will compose; Margo Lion and Amanda Lipitz will produce and the literary world's favorite (only?) happily married couple with four children will pen the book. Will Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark now have to compete with a gang of Brooklyn misfits in capes and nerd glasses? Oh no.

Ms. Waldman, author of Love and Other Possible Pursuits and Bad Mother, and Mr. Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, are also working on a series for HBO called Hobgoblin, about a group of magicians who fight the Nazis in World War II.

But not every project is picked up: HBO passed on purported Nikki Finke drama Tilda (which makes us slightly fearful, despite creative difficulties on the Tilda set, for Aaron Sorkin's inside-media Olbermann pilot), and New York family drama The Miraculous Year. They also passed on a pilot by Alan Ball, the man behind one of the network's only current hits, True Blood. This would seem to make greenlighting of Mr. Milch's series proof that Luck must fill the need for splashy spectacle on the network, or that Michael Mann's involvement as director must be notable in a Scorsese-at-Boardwalk Empire sense.

Martin Scorsese's involvement with the Atlantic City drama (created by Terence Winter) is a good case study: The network's current model seems to be matching high-concept idea with boldface name: Mr. Chabon, Ms. Dunham and Mr. Apatow, Mr. Ferrell and Mr. McKay, Mr. Sorkin, Frank Rich (producer of Julia Louis-Dreyfus project Veep). Their voices are all markedly different from one another's--and from past HBO creators'. The Sopranos came from a TV lifer, David Chase, who'd written for television, without great personal fame, for years before creating his series. It's unlikely that a name like his--at least without a major director along for the ride--could greenlight a series at the network today.

ddaddario@observer.com :: @DPD_

The Atlantic published the reaction of Pulitzer Prize-winning Park Slope novelist Michael Chabon, however, and he voiced his initial lack of enthusiasm with the speech. His complaint has as its origin the comment about slain 9-year-old Christina Taylor-Green, famously born on September 11, 2001. "If there are rain puddles in heaven," Obama said, "Christina is jumping in them today."

He describes his gripe thusly: "I tried to imagine how I would feel if, having, God forbid, lost my precious daughter, born three months and ten days before Christina Taylor-Green, somebody offered this charming, tidy, corny vignette to me by way of consolation. I mean, come on! There is no heaven, man."

But with touching grace Chabon doubles back on his knee-jerk reaction. Sometimes novelists can just do this stuff better.

But I've been chewing these words over since last night, and I've decided that, in fact, they were appropriate to a memorial for a child, far more appropriate, certainly, than all that rude hallooing. A literal belief in heaven is not required to grasp the power of that corny wish, to feel the way the idea of heaven inverts in order to express all the more plainly everything—wishes, hopes and happiness—that the grieving parents must now put away, along with one slicker and a pair of rain boots.

Kudos, Chabon. Your writing has certainly improved since that dark period in the 80s.

Click for What Twitter Taught Us: Piers Morgan Defends A Cell-Abusing Arianna

nfreeman [at] observer.com | @nfreeman1234

In publishing, this signals the start of a season that many believe has the best chance of any in recent memory to redeem the industry after one of its darkest years, and to show that, even in 2009, big, beautiful hit books are still possible. 

Many publishers are saying their fall catalogs are their strongest in years, and after last fall, an unqualified disaster that left the industry demoralized and diminished, much is at stake as their hopes are tested. As one publishing veteran put it, “if this fall doesn’t work out, a lot more of us will not have jobs next year.”

Scribner has it all on the line for Audrey Niffenegger’s new novel, Her Fearful Symmetry, for which they paid $5 million in March. HarperCollins has Michael Crichton’s posthumous pirate book. Knopf Doubleday is preparing for blockbusters by Pat Conroy, Jon Krakauer, and of course, Dan Brown--whose Lost Symbol will be a marathon of a publishing job by itself, but one that promises to pay the division’s rent for years and bring stability to the entire Random House castle.

Such foolproof commercial juggarnauts help publishers and booksellers sleep at night, but the literary-minded among them can cheer too-- holy autumn! What a bunch of novels!

Thomas Pynchon has a new book coming on August 4, as does Richard Russo. Random House is publishing a novel by E. L. Doctorow on September 1st. A week after that, Knopf brings out Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, Nan Talese follows with Margaret Atwood’s The Year of the Flood, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux comes in a little later with Richard Powers’ Generosity: An Enhancement. In October there will be memoirs from Edmund White and Michael Chabon, and new novels from Jonathan Lethem, John Irving, A. S. Byatt, and Dave Eggers. November (think: holiday gifts) will see the publication of new works from Philip Roth, Barbara Kingsolver, and even Vladimir Nabokov. 

Such moments of confluence are rare. Depending on your metric, truly memorable ones tend to come around once every decade or so.

The start of 1985 saw Don Delillo’s White Noise and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian published in the space of a few weeks. The next time it happened was 1997, when Delillo’s Underworld, Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon, Haruki Marukami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, and Roth’s American Pastoral were published within months of each other. The last instance any of the people interviewed for this article brought up was the fall of 2006, which saw the publication of Eggers’ What is the What, Richard Ford’s The Lay of the Land, Powers’ The Echo Maker, Atwood’s Moral Disorder, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children, and Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun.

Such windfalls stick in one’s memory, and having lived through one, you look forward to the next. 

“It was exciting,” said Granta editor John Freeman of fall 2006, who until recently was a full-time freelance book critic. “It’s sort of like Christmas come early. Suddenly there was a period like: big novel, big novel, big novel. I had this slightly neurotic sense like, surely all these books can’t be this good-- but they were! Which was quite nice, because normally you get one good one, and then, you know, some other books.”  

Even in historical context, the fall of 2009 strikes some as extraordinary.

“I have never seen another year like this,” said Sarah McNally, the owner of the popular Soho bookstore McNally Jackson. “I can hardly bear to think about fall’s books, it’s like looking bare-eyed into the sun.”

“I can’t really think of any time since I’ve been in the business, when I had a sense of the degree of anticipation for upcoming books, that would equal this fall,” said the Gernert Co. literary agent Chris Parris-Lamb.

With optimism, however, comes worry—particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.  

“Given that the odds of all the books living up to the author’s and publisher’s expectations are quite slim, it’s a little intimidating,” said Martha Levin, the publisher of Simon & Schuster’s Free Press imprint. “There will be books that get buried in the crush and will not sell as well as did the author’s previous book. It’s inevitable. As a publisher, you stick with the attitude that your books will prevail—until proven to the contrary.”

“But yes,” she added. “It is exciting. Just kind of scary too.”

Predictably, there are some who say this fall is nothing special-- that book publishing whips itself into a frenzy every year around this time. 

“The notion that a killer line-up of books is headed to the stores is a fantasy that big corporate publishers entertain every year starting in spring,” said one editor at a major house. “After they’ve dug out from the post-Christmas returns and begun to face the fact that their spring titles aren’t working.”

“We’ve got a lot of ground to make up,” he said. “And if we can’t do it with books like this, that’s a bad thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

—Additional reporting by Eliza Shapiro and Molly Fischer

As former New York Sun literary editor Tom Meaney explained it to us last year, “If you’re reading a galley on the subway, and someone comes to talk to you, you’re going to share a lot of things in common with them. You can have the right jeans or the right purse or whatever … but if you’re reading How Fiction Works in March, you know, three months before the book comes out, and you get the one girl who is interested in James Wood, well …”

Well, indeed! How Fiction Works was without a doubt one of last year’s most sought-after status galleys. Others included Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Philip Roth’s Indignation. 

Getting on the subway yesterday and spotting someone with a Penguin Group totebag, we wondered: what are this summer’s status galleys? Are there any, or is everyone just anonymously reading Kindles now, as suggested by James Wolcott in this month’s Vanity Fair? 

We made some calls this morning and turns out there are a bunch! 

Joshua Ferris’s January 2010 novel The Unnamed, of which Reagan Arthur Books handed out more than a thousand copies during Book Expo in May, is among them, as is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, which comes out in September. 

Consensus seems to be that the ultimate status galley this season has been Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but actually it’s coming out in three weeks, and according to Tracy Locke, the publicist at Penguin Press, finished books are already being sent out relatively widely. But for a while there, only a very few people could claim to possess the ARC: per Ms. Locke, “They were ... on a very, very, very limited galley distribution. Basically what I did was I looked at what people’s deadlines were, so I went to all the monthlies first, and I sent them out as late as possible. It certainly would qualify as a status galley—we did our best to keep it under wraps.”

Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said that his author Sam Lipsyte’s follow-up to Home Land has been getting a lot of interest. “People really keep calling me to ask when we'll be able to show them Lipsyte,” Mr. Stein said in an email. “I've never had to answer that question so many times. The answer is: galleys by August 5. (And it's really great-looking.)”

Other books people mentioned include Richard Powers’ September novel Generosity: An Enhancement, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, both of which come out in October, and Mary Karr’s November memoir Lit. Sloane Crosley, the publicist at Vintage, suggested Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, which comes out next week but which was never distributed in galley, and the Otto Penzler–edited doorstop volume The Vampire Archives, which Vintage will publish in October and at this early stage is only in the hands of 200 people. 

Plus, Philip Roth once again has a new book coming out, this one called The Humbling and scheduled for publication in November. According to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publicity department, there are 300 copies of that one floating around among critics and editors (500 if you include the ones sent to booksellers) but it’s already stirring buzz on the Twittersphere. Early last month blogger—and occasional book critic for The Observer!—Molly Young tweeted that she was about to go “wait near the mailbox till my galley of Philip Roth's upcoming THE HUMBLING arrives.” 

We caught up with Ms. Young over email this morning and asked her whether it had ever come. It had! Would she describe it?

“The cover is a grayish-pebble color and the book is very, very slim,” Ms. Young reported. “Almost pamphlet-sized. With big type. The cover looks like a typical Glaser cover, unobtrusive but immediately recognizable.” 

How did she happen to be among the lucky few to receive the book?  

“A kind editor sent me the book as a favor,” she said. “He was aware that I like Roth a lot—especially short Roth novels with lots of sex in them—and agreed to let me have a peek. The provision was that I not review or quote from the book, since there were future changes to be (possibly) made.”

She said she hadn’t spent any time reading The Humbling in public, and so could not say whether it worked the way a status galley is expected to. 

“[I] read it strictly in private, mostly because the content was racy enough to make me squirm,” Ms. Young said. “It's a very titillating book and I like to maintain a noble bearing in public, so this was not the reading material to support that goal."  She added: "Plus, if I saw someone reading a covetable ARC in public I'd interpret it as a weird passive mating call. I guess it's no worse than wearing an obscure band T-shirt—you're advertising your taste in hopes of attracting the select few who value that same object. But romances predicated on taste are sort of doomed, no? It's a flimsy pretext."

A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.

Here's a translation of Jong's more spirited quotes to the Milan-based Corriere, as selected by Rocca.

She also laments that not all of America's men of letters share her devotion to Obama.

"Tom Wolfe and John Updike are men of the right and Philip Roth is at this point a hermit who leads a monastic life in Connecticut, far from everything and everybody."

Luckily, she said there is her and Michael Chabon, who, she says, have "taken the place of Susan Sontag and Norman Mailer respectively."

They have the same political sensibilities, she said, but a better "sense of humor."

"You've heard it straight from the tropical mouth of a teenager who is entirely conscientious of the metamorphoses in ideas, principles (or lack thereof) and influences being undergone right under your collective noses," Mr. Niedenthal wrote in his letter. "The next Great American Novel will come not from Pynchon, Wallace, DeLillo (he’s already had his turn anyway) or any other of your literary heroes."

He went on: "It will spring from the iMac-fettered keyboards of the young, challenging, Facebook-and-MySpace-addled minds that you have so hastily jettisoned as literary jetsam, from those who see and comprehend, still to the delirious ignorance of the villainous Powers That Be, incalculable brands of grade-A terror being perpetrated unabashedly both by those whom we trust and those whom we loathe."

Mr. Niedenthal's rhetoric has not gone unnoticed: In the days since his letter appeared, he has received e-mails from editors at Grove/Atlantic and HarperCollins interested in seeing his work. (His father has also expressed his interest.)

Media Mob thought we should get familiar now, before he gets any more famous. Below, excerpts from a Q&A with the sad young literary man.

What was the purpose of your letter?

It was just sort of to let the current, older, wiser literary vanguard know that we’re out there and that we’re not all complete failures yet. I just wanted to let them know there’s a new literary generation coming, I hope.

What do you like to read?

Right now I’m more into modern and postmodern stuff, not anything really contemporary. Like I’m reading Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell right now. I like William Vollmann, too ... William Gaddis, Pynchon, John Barth, that stuff, mostly.

Are there young writers you like?

Keith Gessen – I really like him. I haven’t gotten around to reading his novel yet. I read an excerpt from it. I just really like his ideas, just the way he portrays the sort of meandering young New Yorker. It’s kind of what I aspire to be, so it’s kind of really poignant. I’m really looking forward to reading that eventually. I just read the excerpt on the n+1 Web site, which I only heard about once his book came out and the hype about him started to circulate. He’s really good. Also I like Scott Snyder. And who’s that guy? I can’t think of his name ... Jonathan Lethem. I like him a lot. And Michael Chabon, of course. And David Foster Wallace, of course—he is absolutely incredible.

And do you think the editors of the Times Book Review just aren’t paying attention?

They’re not paying attention. ... I think it’s really hard for them to look outside of their own purview of the literary world. Not that I’m an expert or anything at all, but that’s what I’ve gotten from reading it a good while, that it’s very incestuous. I really enjoy reading it, but they could stand to step outside themselves a little. I’m sorry if that sounds elitist. They’re all of a single mind-set, I guess. I don’t know. I don’t think I have enough experience to really comment because I’m so new to this kind of thing. But the old literary generation is going to die off eventually, and it’s quite obvious that this new generation is going to be a lot more adventurous and experimental.

What do your friends read? Do you know a lot of young writers? Who is the "we" in your letter?

I don’t really have any friends who are writers, or much of readers for that matter, but I do live in Birmingham Alabama, so ... Honestly, I don’t know [if New York is any better], because wherever you go there are still going to be kids who waste their lives. But there’s definitely a literary set, if you will – the kids going to the bigger liberal arts colleges and stuff. I think that’s mostly the next literary generation. ... It’s kind of intimidating because I didn’t grow up in a literary setting at all. Neither of my parents are big readers at all. I’m kind of freaked out by the whole New York scene. It seems so ... I don’t want to say judgmental, but so ... mutable. It changes so often. I can’t keep track of it. It’s kind of hard for me, because I don’t want to follow any trends in my writing, but I do want to get published. But I don’t want to sell my soul. It’s all very intimidating.

How would you describe your fiction?

Recently it’s far less so, but it’s kind of bloviated – kind of lofty, I guess. Big sentences. My older stuff was basically just a knockoff of Gravity’s Rainbow or something. And I used to be really into Joyce. It’s all very dense but now I sort of make it more readable without sacrificing any of my ideas. And I’m working on something book-length now. I want to have that finished by the end of the summer, if I don’t get tired of it and abandon it, which has happened like three times.

What’s your hometown like?

I live in the suburbs. I live very close to the city, but it’s not really a city. It’s not bad—there’s culture here. There’s music. In respect to literature, though, there’s pretty much nothing at all. I know David Sedaris came last year to read, and I think we have a poetry slam team here. But that’s all.

What happened after your letter was printed?

I got contacted by a couple of publishers—Grove/Atlantic, and then Harpercollins contacted me, too. ... The guy from Grove/Atlantic just said he wanted to see if I had anything book-length. And I said I’d probably have something by the end of the summer, if he wanted to see it then. And the guy from HarperCollins wanted to know what I was reading, and he wanted to see some of my writing, which was just really cool. And then I got a really, really sweet Facebook message from this girl in New Orleans, just some random person. She said, ‘Thank God someone from our generation finally spoke up and out to the literary community and let them know that we are on our way.’

Comment on websites that make passing references to their work, of course. On Friday, Slate ran an article by Jeet Heer about Frederic Wertham, the psychiatrist who whipped American into a moral panic over indecency in comic books in the 1950s. Wertham, who wrote Seduction of the Innocent, appears in David Hajdu's The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America as well as in Michael Chabon's 2001 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, in what Slate's Heer calls "a brief and unsympathetic cameo."

Unsympathetic cameo!? Mr. Chabon begs to differ, and did so in Slate's user free-for-all, The Fray. As Moira Redmond recounts in Slate's FrayWatch column, Chabon posted a 13-paragraph response that read in part:

Chabon also objected to the notion that Wertham's appearance in K&C is a cameo, insisting, "it's closer to a namecheck, but that's a semantic matter, I suppose."

In a stroke of winning modesty, the author has a little fun pointing out a typo in his award-heavy book, wherein he bumbled Dr. Wertham's first name as "Fredric," to which he appended an emphatic, "[sic!]."