Michael Chabon shed some more light on his next book, saying “a lot of the same concerns, themes, motifs, and even to some degree conventions, that I have been exploring in my recent work will find their way into this book.”

In an interview with science fiction magazine Locus, Chabon says the new book will take place in Oakley and Berkeley, a place he says he loves and “it turns out I actually know a lot about.” The novel appears to be the same untitled Bay Area novel that Chabon, which is set to come out around 2011.

“I want to write another novel for younger readers and I know what that’s going to be, but I just felt that it had been since Wonder Boys in the early ’90s that I had written a novel set in consensus reality — modern-day America — and I missed it,” Chabon said.

The full interview appears in the August issue of Locus.

Today is the last day for the Democratic National Convention, where Ayelet Waldman has been representing Berkeley as a delegate for Barack Obama.

The Berkeley Daily Planet profiled Waldman last week about becoming a delegate. “I was surprised I won,” Waldman said. “I wasn’t sure who would come. I ran on a slate with a friend, and we asked as many friends to come as possible; they would have to give up a beautiful Sunday. And when I arrived I saw this line, and I went up and down the line of people, campaigning.”

At the convention, an ABC affiliate interviewed Waldman about what it was like attending law school with Obama at Harvard. “He was someone you absolutely knew,” she said. “Everyone knew Barack at law school. It was very clear even then that he had some kind of special gift.”

Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union won the Hugo Award on Saturday for best novel.

It’s the second science-fiction related prize that the novel has nabbed since it was published last summer. In April, Chabon won the Nebula Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America. He was nominated for an Edgar from the Mystery Writers of America, but lost to John Hart’s Down River.

GalleyCat notes that while Yiddish Policemen isn’t the first book to win both the Hugo and Nebula, “it is arguably the first time that either award has been given to a book that was not published as a science fiction or fantasy novel.”