The Daily Telegraph carries an op-ed piece by Michael Chabon detailing his journey from chronicler of Pittsburgh youth to writer of Jewish sword-swinging adventures:

I’m not saying — let me be clear about this — I am not saying that I disparage, or repudiate my early work, or the genre (late-century naturalism) it mostly exemplifies. I am proud of stories such as “House Hunting”, “S Angel”, “Werewolves in Their Youth”, and “Son of the Wolfman”, and out of all my novels I may always be most fond of Wonder Boys, which saved my life, kind of, or saved me, at least, from having to live in a world in which I must forever be held to account for the doomed second novel it supplanted.

I’m not turning my back on the stuff I wrote there, late in the 20th century, and I hope that readers won’t either. It’s just that in Gentlemen of the Road, as in some of its recent predecessors, you catch me in the act of trying, as a writer, to do what many of the characters in my earlier stories — Art Bechstein, Grady Tripp, Ira Wiseman — were trying, longing, ready to do: I have gone off in search of a little adventure.

Read the whole thing here.

“The Mysteries of Pittsburgh” film adaptation may screen at the Sundance Film Festival in January, actor Peter Sarsgaard told Pittsburgh Post-Gazette last week.

“It’s the kind of movie that needs to go to a festival” to get exposure and a distribution backer, he said.

Sarsgaard said he hadn’t watched the final film yet. “I don’t like watching movies that I’m in without an audience,” he said. “They all seem bad if you watch them by yourself.”