A review by drewjameson
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon

3.0

A collection of pop-scholarship on (not exactly in defense of) "pop-literature" or genre fiction and writers, including himself, whose work straddles the artificial border between "serious fiction" and "pulp/genre fiction". It's hard to know what to do with these essays. Some resemble personal narratives providing back story into his inspirations for his novels, but without a huge depth of detail or insight, and others resemble scholarly essays sans vital background information or evidence for his arguments. So far, it reads like auto-biographic Cliffnotes to Michael Chabon's own oeuvre.”