Gentlemen of the Road (English)

In his introduction to the MCSWEENEY'S MAMMOTH TREASURY OF THRILLING TALES, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon confessed his boredom with "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story" (including his own) and expressed his desire for a return to the horror/adventure/ghost/detectives tales of Poe, Balzac, Conrad, Faulkner, Twain and the like. It was, in short, a call to arms for literature not to forget the pleasures and power of plot and genre, a low-brow manifesto that can be seen as a curative against Jonathan Franzen's famous Harper's essay demanding more novels of ideas. Chabon has been more than faithful to his aesthetic ideology, with each of his novels veering further afield from his acclaimed but stolidly realist early work (MYSTERIES OF PITTSBURGH, WONDER BOYS) and into the realms of fantasy and science-fiction. GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD, a 10th-century swashbuckling adventure tale about two wandering adventurers and their attempts to return a spoiled prince to the throne of Khazaria, can be seen as the apotheosis of this new direction. Chabon has shed all trapping of the "contemporary literary novel" and fully embraces the captivating thrills of Edgar Rice Burroughs or the ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. Originally appearing in serialized form in The New York Times Magazine, GENTLEMEN OF THE ROAD (written with the working title of JEWS WITH SWORDS) crackles with delicious plot twists, breathtaking cliff-hangers, larger-than-life characters, and perfectly pitched purple prose. minimize