Bookends: Collected Intros and Outros

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about books—age-old classics as well as his own—that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the literature that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

Chabon asks why anyone would write an introduction or, for that matter, read one. His own daughter Rose prefers to skip them. Chabon’s answer is simple and simultaneously profound: “a hope of bringing pleasure for the reader.” Likewise, afterwords are all about shared pleasure, the “pure love” of a work of art that has inspired, awakened, or transformed the reader. Ultimately, as readers make their way through these pages, an argument emerges about the profound interrelation between reading and writing, and the irrelevance of distinctions between high and low, between genre and mainstream, to the power of literature.