The Anchorage Daily News (my state’s newspaper) has the inevitable Alaska newspaper story today. As in, “You mean there’s a book coming out that has 3.2 million Jews in Sitka? Has this guy ever even been to Sitka?”

“I fully expected Alaskans to just be horrified by this,” Chabon laughed, “that so many people would show up on their doorstep, regardless of who they are.”

Seriously, the article is a good backgrounder into the history of the Jewish Alaska plan. Why? Because the article’s author, Tom Kizzia, wrote a four-part series in 1999 about the real plan Chabon based his novel on.