From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Wonder Boys: A Novel |
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| Author: | Michael Chabon |
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| Genres: | |
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| Publisher: | Saint Martin's Press |
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In Wonder Boys we meet James Leer, a troubled young “wonder boy” whose obsession with Hollywood suicides leads him to commit a pair of startling crimes. Thereby his destiny becomes entangled with that of his writing teacher, Grady Tripp, a former prodigy whose penchant for self-destruction is exceeded only by the twenty-six hundred pages of his unfinished magnum opus, Wonder Boys—a leviathan of a novel that is devouring his life. Joined by Terry Crabtree, Grady’s editor—another onetime boy wonder whose appetite for the bizarre has derailed a promising career—teacher and student set out across a mysterious nighttime landscape to search for a vision of redemption, a shot at literary fame, and the threadbare black satin jacket in which Marilyn Monroe wed Joe DiMaggio.
Related works
Wonder Boys: Music from the Motion Picture
Various Artists
Director Curtis Hanson chooses a lineup of vintage rock and R&B for the musical side of his screen adaptation of Michael Chabon’s brilliant
Wonder Boys. Foremost is Bob Dylan, who contributes a new rocker, “Things Have Changed,” as well as cuts from
Blood on the Tracks,
Oh Mercy, and
Time Out of Mind. These 13 cuts do a fine job of limning Michael Douglas’s lead character’s confusion, regret, and weary-to-the-bone ambivalence. Smartly sequenced—soul giants Little Willie John and Clarence Carter fit perfectly alongside the likes of…
Wonder Boys
Curtis Hanson
Wonder Boys is one of those movies in which more twists and turns disrupt the life of the hero in one weekend than would bother most of us our whole lives. Professor Grady Tripp (Michael Douglas) is an aging one-novel wunderkind at a small Pittsburgh college who’s laboring on his seven-years-in-the-making, 2000-plus page second opus with no end in sight. The morning of the college’s literary lollapalooza, WordFest, Grady’s wife leaves him; that evening, his mistress (Frances McDormand) announces she’s pregnant (she’s also the chancellor of the school, as…
