Werewolves in Their Youth: Stories - Softcover

Chabon is a master of the lively and unexpected description, his prose studded with images that split these mostly conventionally themed stories wide open. Consider his burly Quebecois carpenter, who has "a face that looked as if it had been carved with a pneumatic drill by a tiny workman dangling from the sheer granite cliff of Olivier's forehead." Or the "local drunks" of a Chubb Island bar, "a close-knit population, involved in an ongoing collective enterprise: the building, over several generations, of a basilica of failure, on whose crowded friezes they figured in vivid depictions of bankruptcy, drug rehabilitation, softball, and arrest." Or, the narrator of "Mrs. Box" and his failed marriage: "...very soon they had been forced to confront the failure of an expedition for which they had set out remarkably ill-equipped, like a couple of trans-Arctic travelers who through lack of preparation find themselves stranded and are forced to eat their dogs." Werewolves in Their Youth is worth reading for such moments alone. When Chabon uses them to illuminate our darkest impulses and fears, the result is often revelatory.

"[Michael Chabon] has a captivating, fluid way of writing that surrounds and shields these bewildered people with descriptions and observations both apt and moving.... When you read these stories, it may strike you how seldom you come across really beautiful writing...Chabon's writing is unique. It's truthful and lyrical, and it bestows on these troubled children of his imagination a measure of grace." --Susan Kelly, USA Today

"Mr. Chabon writes with enormous fluency in these pages, captivating the reader with his descriptive and metaphoric powers." --Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

"A loving craftsman and the author of superb, seemingly alchemically rendered sentences, Chabon has been producing pitch-perfect, at times even dazzling, fiction.... While his language has relinquished none of its vividness, Chabon has mellowed it into an elegant vessel of irony and empathy." --Michael Carroll, Los Angeles Times Book Review