Chabon's other collection of essays, Manhood for Amateurs, felt to this reader like a bunch of deadline-pressed tidbits sandwiched between strong opening and closing pieces.
Maps and Legends, on the other hand, is compelling throughout as Chabon, a shameless geek, wanders through and across genre and high-art/low-art boundaries to defend, examine, and recover a lost sense of entertainment in literature.
Chabon loads his flawless prose with meaning, humor, and insight into what makes stories work, how we read them, and how we should categorize them if we should at all.
His closing essay works wonders with the theme of storytelling as the art of lying. Although he's not exactly the first writer to speak of this, the way he embeds his message in the structure and narrative of the piece is a thing to behold.
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