In case you missed it, Gentlemen of the Road, Chabon’s newest novel, hit stands this week. It collects the serial adventure stories first published in The New York Times Magazine earlier this year. It’s suggested retail price is $21.95. Go get it!

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.”

Ayelet Waldman’s worst book signing ever? It was her first, according to a cool article on bad book signings by The Baltimore Sun.

“My very first book was published on the same day that one of the Harry Potter books was published,” she said. “I sat at a table at Waldenbooks telling people, ‘Right down the hall and turn left.’ I didn’t sell a single book, but I gave many, many people directions” to the stacks of J.K. Rowling books.

Waldman appears to have her dates mixed up a little. Nursery Crimes, her first novel, was published June 1, 2000, a month before The Goblet of Fire hit stands. She probably meant to say her signing was the same day Harry Potter came out.

Newark Star-Ledger caught up with Chabon and asked him what he is reading right now.

Among the books: Jane Austen’s “Pride and Prejudice,” “Persuasion,” and “Emma,” part of an Austen kick Chabon’s been on lately.

“I love Austen’s tone,” he says. “It’s all about the tone and the point of view. I go over her paragraphs endlessly, to see how she manages to convey the amount of contempt you are supposed to feel for a character, or the respect you are sup posed to feel for a character, and the way that she modulates contempt and respect in the same paragraph. There is great pleasure in reading her books.”

Chabon says he also recently re-read “The Charterhouse of Parma” by Stendhal.

“I love the way that he is addressing his French readers and trying to make these Italian characters comprehensible, when he is actually mocking his French readers,” Chabon says. “I was close to Fabrizio’s age when I read it. I was 18. I think I missed a lot of Fabrizio’s ironic detachment as an older man looking back at his youth. I just admired his adventurous spirit. The fact that he was kind of an idiot was lost on me then.”

Chabon also says he recently read “The Death of the Detective” by Mark Smith, which Chabon says it one of Jonathan Lethem’s favorite books.

“The novel is set in the Chicago underworld with a detective investigating a murder,” Chabon says. “It’s a huge 1970s novel, from the era of Pyn chon and Gaddis.”