TheNew York Timesbestseller followinga big-hearted, exhilarating novel exploring the profoundly intertwined lives of twoOakland families.An immensely gifted writer and magical prose stylist.Michiko Kakutani,New York TimesNew York Timesbestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon has transported readers to wonderful places: to New York City during the Golden Age of comic books (The Amazing Adventures ofKavalier Clay); to an imaginary Jewish homeland in Sitka, Alaska (The Yiddish Policemens Union); to discoverThe Mysteries of Pittsburgh. Now he takes us toTelegraph Avenuein a big-hearted and exhilarating novel that explores the profoundly intertwined lives of two Oakland, California families, one black and one white. InTelegraph Avenue, Chabon lovingly creates a world grounded in pop cultureKung Fu, 70s Blaxploitation films, vinyl LPs, jazz and soul musicand delivers a bravura epic of friendship, race, and secret histories.As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in therelongtime friends, bandmates, and coregents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Their wives, Gwen Shanks and Aviva Roth-Jaffe, are the Berkeley Birth Partners, a pair of semilegendary midwives who have welcomed more than a thousand newly minted citizens into the dented utopia at whose heart-half tavern, half temple-stands Brokeland. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fifth-richest black man in America, announces plans to build his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. Meanwhile, Aviva and Gwen also find themselves caught up in a battle for their professional existence, one that tests the limits of their friendship. Adding another layer of complication to the couples already tangled lives is the surprise appearance of Titus Joyner, the teenage son Archy has never acknowledged and the love of 15-year-old Julius Jaffes life.