Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands

In these lively critical and personal essays, Chabon asserts his literary manifesto: “I read for entertainment, and I write to entertain. Period.”
This collection of sixteen essays champions the cause of sci-fi and westerns, superheroes and horror shows, gumshoes and goblins—all the genre novels, comics, and pulp fiction that get pushed aside when literary discussion turns serious. For Chabon, the stories that give us great pleasure are in many ways our truest, best art—the building blocks of our shared imagination. Whether he’s taking up Superman or Sherlock Holmes, Poe or Proust, Chabon’s emphatic mission is to explore the reasons we tell each other tales, and to offer a glimpse of his own history as reader and writer. This ebook features a biography of the author.