Chabon’s ‘Telegraph Avenue’ out in fall 2012

Michael Chabon, photo by Jennifer Chaney

2012 is shaping up to be a year of heavy-hitters, what with new releases from Toni Morrison, Richard Ford, Hilary Mantel, John Irving and many many more. (Tip: Keep an eye on the frequently-updated sidebar at the lower right that says, “Our most-anticipated releases.”)

Here’s another for our list: Next fall, you can get your hands on Telegraph Avenue by Michael Chabon, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (BookPage interviewed him about the novel here). HarperPerennial confirmed the release with a tweet. All we know now is that it’s out sometime in Fall 2012.

Telegraph Avenue is a real street that runs about 4.5 miles from Oakland, CA, to Berkeley. In January 2011, Chabon wrote an essay for The Atlantic about the concept of a “hometown.” Here’s an excerpt that gives us some insight into the book:

The new book–it’s called Telegraph Avenue–is actually set as fully in Oakland as in Berkeley. Each of those cities (Watson and Mycroft respectively to the showboating Holmes of San Francisco) has its own distinct character, or set of characteristics, its unique inheritance of grace and problems. Yet the line between them, a block and a half from my house, ambles. It blurs. At times it all but vanishes–or maybe, generalizing wildly, Oakland with its history of tough-mindedness and Berkeley with its mania for insight, together conspire to expose the arbitrariness of all such hand-drawn borderlines.

In a Q&A with California Magazine, Chabon also shared the highlights of a “Michael Chabon tour of Telegraph” (it includes creamsicles, scouring a record store and more).

We’ll share more as soon as we have an official plot description and a pub date, but for now I thought Chabon fans would appreciate this news! Read more about the author on BookPage.com.

So far what’s your most-anticipated novel of 2012?