Now available in paperback

Chabon's writing has always preyed and played on traditionally disparaged forms, the pulp of fiction, with an unfashionable and unmodernist pleasure in plot: in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) it was the superhero comic; in his novella The Final Solution (2004) it was the Sherlock Holmes detective story. In The Yiddish Policemen's Union, his fourth adult novel, he plays with two genres: the counterfactual, derived from Philip K. Dick; and the noir thriller, derived from Chandler and Hammett. The counterfactual is all in the background. The thriller is all in the foreground. The thematic link between the two is the endlessly precarious nature of Jewishness.

(LRB 16 August 2007)

Fourth Estate | hardback 414 pp. |ISBN: 9780007150397