My least favorite of his books so far. Maybe it was just being in training at the time that ruined it for me? ( )

Stories with characters who never quite got a grip on life and encountered such turbulence that they lost what little they had, though through some alchemy of mischance a few get knocked back into a better positions. The stew of inept anger and inarticulate guilt, sexual, social, professional is all very recognizable. ( )

This is a really good (IMO) early collection of stories by Chabon. Stories about the human condition with a little twist. The title story in on boys playing at werewolves, Son of the Wolfman is on a husband's reaction when his childless wife decides to keep the baby from a rape, and Mrs. Box is on a man who tries to rob his ex-wife's grandmother. The last story, interestingly is a gothic/lovecraftian horror story told by a fictitious author who is introduced to us by the main character of Chabon's 2nd novel The Wonder Boys
(Son of the Wolfman) The front porch had been overwhelmed years before by a salmon pink bougainvillea, and a disheveled palm tree murmured in the backyard, battering the roof at night with inedible nuts. It had been fall, the only season in Southern California that made any lasting claim on the emotions

(Spikes) She yearned to have a child. Kohn was an Easterner, socially awkward, obsessive. He was an instrument maker who built custom electric guitars, mostly for the Japanese market, and he preferred to keep his own yearnings pressed between the clear panes of a marijuana habit where he could safely observe them. ( )

Awesome

Chabon never disappoints. His writing transports me to worlds and environs I have never been before. What shall I read next? ( )

A paired look at Rohinton Mistry Tales from Firozsha Baag and Michael Chabon Werewolves in Their Youth.

I chanced upon these back to back, both short story collections, both by writers in their working youth – Mistry’s first book and an early one for Chabon. Both as much as anything nostalgic, bittersweet recollections of childhood, the middle class childhoods of their own existences.

Chabon: laugh out loud funny – you know…so that it gets almost irritating for those who are suffering through your pleasure. They start sounding snarky when they say they must read it too. The guy’s brilliant, this collection is splendid.

Mistry: the blurb says ‘extremely funny’. But the only good thing about the shit of his world – and I mean that literally, the shit on the street, the upstairs lavatory that leaks onto your head as you sit on the toilet, the filth, the water supply turned off at 6am because the city is without again, the monsoonal water running down the inside of your house – the good thing about it is that this is all happening to middle class educated people, the same ones who, had they lived in Chabon’s childhood, would have been clean and without want. This life he writes of is the relatively privileged existence one can have in India, that’s what I mean by ‘good’. I mean, there is a worse life. I couldn’t imagine anything less hilarious. I could not imagine anything, if it comes to that, less ‘compassionate’ – another promise of the blurb. I don’t know that Mistry is ever the victim of that sentiment, but certainly not in this book.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2016/10/18/chabon-and-mistry-short-s... ( )