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Michael Chabon

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Author

The Resume

    (May 24, 1963- )
    Born in Washington, District of Columbia
    Wrote ‘The Mysteries of Pittsburgh’ (1989), ‘Wonder Boys’ (1995), ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ (2000), ‘The Yiddish Policeman’s Union’ (2007), ‘Telegraph Avenue’ (2012) and ‘Moonglow’ (2016)
    Last name is pronounced 'Shea-bon': ‘Shea as in Shea Stadium, Bon as in Bon Jovi’

Why he might be annoying:

    He spent five years working on a second novel, ‘Fountain City,’ that ballooned to over 1,500 pages before he abandoned it. (He had concluded the novel was not working a good 800+ pages earlier, but was reluctant to quit because he had already spent the publisher’s advance.)
    He turned down an offer to be included in People magazine’s ’50 Most Beautiful People’ issue: ‘To be praised for something like that is just weird.’
    He created a fictional author, August Van Zorn (‘the greatest unknown horror writer of the twentieth century’), plus a complete bibliography for him, and an equally fictional literary scholar of Van Zorn’s work, Leon Chaim Bach.
    He said, ‘anyone who has ever received a bad review knows how it outlasts, by decades, the memory of a favorable word.’

Why he might not be annoying:

    His first novel was his masters thesis, which his advisor, without telling him, submitted to a literary agent, who was able to negotiate a $155,000 advance (compared to the typical advance for a first-time novelist of $5,000-$7,500).
    He turned his experience with ‘Fountain City’ into his second novel, ‘Wonder Boys.’
    He won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for ‘Kavalier and Clay.’
    He is a booster of genre fiction.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    For 2024, as of last weekly ranking, Out of 1 Votes: 0% Annoying
    In 2023, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2021, Out of 5 Votes: 80.0% Annoying
    In 2020, Out of 2 Votes: 100% Annoying
    In 2019, Out of 2 Votes: 50.0% Annoying
    In 2018, Out of 13 Votes: 53.85% Annoying