Wonder Boys
Wonder Boys is Michael Chabon's 1995 second novel, his follow-up to The Mysteries of Pittsburgh and the book that established him as one of the central comic-novelists of his generation. Across a single chaotic Pittsburgh weekend in late winter, Grady Tripp, a once-celebrated novelist now teaching writing at a fictional university very much like Carnegie Mellon, watches his life dismantle itself. His third wife has left him that morning; his lover, the chancellor of the college, has just told him she is pregnant; his prodigiously talented young writing student James Leer, sharply dressed and possibly suicidal, has shot the chancellor's husband's dog at a literary party; and his own seven-years-overdue novel, an unwieldy 2,611-page manuscript called Wonder Boys, is filling every drawer in his house. Chabon writes a comic novel of midlife failure with an unmistakable affection for the doomed weekend at its center, and a closing grace none of the characters quite deserve.
Themes & atmosphere
Also by Michael Chabon
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What you might want to know about Wonder Boys
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
Pittsburgh creative writing professor Grady Tripp has been at work on his second novel for seven years, and the manuscript is more than two thousand pages.
Yes. Curtis Hanson's 2000 film starred Michael Douglas, Tobey Maguire, and Frances McDormand. The screenplay was nominated for an Academy Award.
Loosely. Chabon was a young writer working on his second novel for years, and the protagonist is a creative-writing professor in Pittsburgh, where Chabon attended graduate school. The plot is invented.
Wonder Boys was written by Michael Chabon, published in 1995 by Dtv.
Wonder Boys is 368 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Wonder Boys takes most readers 6 to 8 hours to finish.
Wonder Boys is a standalone novel by Michael Chabon, not part of a series.
Wonder Boys is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.