The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shared interest in drawing, Sammy and Joe share several connections to Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini: Joe (like comics legend Jim Steranko) studied magic and escapology in Prague, which aided him in his departure from Europe, and Sammy is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudeville circuit. When Sammy discovers Joe's artistic talent, Sammy gets Joe a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company, which, due to the recent success of Superman, is attempting to get into the comic-book business. Under the name "Sam Clay", Sammy starts writing adventure stories with Joe illustrating them, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce Amazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company's novelty items). The pair is at once passionate about their creation, optimistic about making money, and always nervous about the opinion of their employers.
Stats for nerds
10recommend
13mentions
13people
2008–2025years
77% recommend8% neutral15% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- > Alexander Gerschenkron, a labor historian at Harvard, in a 1978 issue of the American Scholar set out three criteria for a good book: It should be intrinsically interesting, it should be memorable, and it should be re-readable. Hemingway, alas, passes only the second of these tests, and is today probably not worth reading much beyond anyone’s twenty-first year.
Wow!
> The twentieth century may have widened the subject matter of the novel, but it has failed to deepen it.
What about Faulkner? Toni Morrison?
I share the sentiment about the magnitude of the loss of the novel, should it occur. Probably the last truly great novel I read was The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and that's twenty-some years old.
- This was one of my favorite books of the year. Reminded me very much of "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay," which is my #1 of all time.
- This story, in part, is the inspiration for the book "The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay", which I would highly recommend!
- Some recent-ish ones, because many of my classic ones have been mentioned:
Rotherweird by Andrew Caldecott
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Prague Cemetery by Umberto Eco.
Here by Richard McGuire
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon
- There is a fantastic Michael Chabon book _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay_ which has a similar space carved out of the Empire State Building.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Amazing_Adventures_of_Kava...
- If anyone is interested in this era of comic books and the society they bred, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon is a smart, excellently written novel.
It covers the comic book culture in NYC in WW2 and the years after, and covers a scenario very similar to this report.
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