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.