A book signing in Florida by Michael Chabon scheduled for tonight has been canceled due to the NCAA championship game between the University of Florida and the University of California, Los Angeles.

Chabon’s appearance at the University of Florida’s Hillel Jewish Center was canceled after a conflict arose related to the game, The Gainesville Sun reports. The University of Florida’s Gators face-off against UCLA’s Bruins in tonight’s game.

Oddly, the paper reports Chabon was supposed to be signing his new novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. That book doesn’t hit the stands until January 2007.

The Center for Jewish Studies, the event’s sponsor, has no plans to reschedule Chabon.

Original reports had Chabon canceling the appearance personally just to see the game. However, Chabon says that’s just not true.

“That’s crazy,” he told GalleyCat. “I don’t give a shit about basketball!”

He adds: “I have missed WORLD SERIES games because I had a speaking gig, and I love baseball inordinately.”

Chabon’s agent has offered to reschedule, but the school has yet to respond.

Correction: This story originally stated Chabon canceled the event himself, based on what the newspaper article reported. This has since been corrected.

The film adaptation of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay recently moved into pre-production, Michael Chabon said Wednesday.

In a posting on his Web site, Chabon said Paramount Picture’s adaptation, produced by Scott Rudin and directed by Stephen Daldry, has begun design work.

“Though the production has by no means been greenlighted, prospects for this long-running, oft-moribund project are suddenly looking better than they ever have before,” Chabon said.

Production designer Patrizia von Brandenstein and costume designer Ann Roth have begun work, Chabon said. The film’s comic book elements, “of which there are many,” is being overseen by Paul Pope.

Casting has also begun, Chabon said, though not roles have been cast yet.

In other news, Chabon confirmed that Dark Horse Comic’s The Escapists, the six-issue limited series spinning-off from the now-canceled Michae Chabon Presents: The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist, will debut this summer.

Writing for Disney’s Snow and the Seven is “ongoing,” Chabon said. And Chabon said The Yiddish Policemen’s Union will hit book stores in January.

“Really. No, really.”

Two stories that were completed for Dark Horse’s The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist series before it was canceled will not be in this summer’s The Escapists, a Dark Horse spokesman said Tuesday.

Lee Dawson, Dark Horse publicity director, said the first six-issue series of The Escapists will feature just Brian K. Vaughan and Steve Rolston’s story arc. Dawson said an official press announcement about the series will be sent out “soon.”

“I should have more info on the ‘missing’ stories soon as well,” Dawson said via e-mail.

Before it was canceled, The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist #9 was scheduled to include two stories in addition to the on-going “Escapists” stories. Howard Chaykin and artist Jed Dougherty had completed a story featuring a battle between several decades’ incarnations of Luna Moth. Stuart Moore and Phil Winslade had finished a 1970’s story featuring the Escapist and a certain gonzo journalist.

The Escapists hits stores in July.

Two of Michael Chabon’s earliest works reflected “Millerite misogyny,” the Pulitzer Prize-winning author says in this month’s Details.

In his monthly column for the men’s magazine, Chabon says readers “can see clear traces of [misogyny] in The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and its mournful ghost in my short story ‘Millionaires.'”

Chabon says his early writing was influenced by Henry Miller, author of Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn, who Chabon calls “my great literary hero from the age of 16 to about 19.”

“If they are women, they are his cunts,” Chabon says of Miller’s characterization of women in his books.

Misogyny is natural to young men, Chabon says.

“Because I was bright and a would-be artiste, my own misogyny wore a beret, as it were, and quoted Nietzche,” Chabon says. “But it was just — and I don’t mean to excuse it with that adverb — garden-variety late-teenage, homosocial misogyny as practiced by young men all over the world.”

A M.F.A. fiction workshop at the University of California, Irvine, where more than half of the students were women, broke Chabon of much of his misogyny, the author says.

“I want to stress that what followed was not just some rude awakening or shakedown cruise where I tried to get these women to sleep with me and one by one they shot me down,” Chabon says. “Okay, so there was some of that, but the fact of the matter is that I had been on a losing streak with women for a long time — at least it felt like a long time — and had already begun to see reflected, in the eyes of the some of the girls I had gotten nowhere with, a certain weariness with, or distrust of, or even distaste for, my displays of Milleresque big-souled callowness.”

Chabon’s column appears in March’s Details. Chabon typically reposts these on his Web site two months after publication.

A review in New York magazine that said Ayelet Waldman was “writing in the shadow of husband Michael Chabon” caused Waldman to cry, USA Today reported Thursday.

The article, by Boris Kachka, briefly outlined the lives of the authors of four different books about families, including Waldman’s newest novel, Love and Other Impossible Persuits.

Kachka describes Waldman as “[w]riting in the shadow of husband Michael Chabon, especially after contributing a Times ‘Styles’ column that bragged about preferring her Adonis of a mate to her own children A recent joint magazine interview demonstrated that for this couple, there’s no such thing as too much information.”

“Usually I try not to read that stuff. For someone who writes openly about her life, I have the thinnest skin,” Waldman told USA Today. “I don’t like feeling that people don’t like me. It makes me very upset.”

Waldman was also asked about her next novel, Winter’s End, which she says she got the idea for after being confronted by several women on Oprah.

“I looked at those women and thought, ‘That’s the kind of person I want to write about’: the person who prepared herself so completely for a professional career, was single-minded about it, then got married and had children and found herself with a totally different life.

“It’s a good life in this sort of Madame Bovary way,” Waldman said. “It’s beautiful and perfect and seems to be just what you want but ends up becoming a gilded cage.”

Check out the full interview here.