Michael Chabon’s ‘Telegraph Avenue’

Michael Chabon’s next book, “Telegraph Avenue,” is confirmed for release in fall 2012, and locals will appreciate that it’s set where he lives, near the border between Berkeley and Oakland. Here’s part of how he described the Telegraph Avenue ecosystem (in one long sentence) in The Atlantic back in January:

The real Telegraph Avenue runs straight as a steel cable, changing its nature more or less completely every ten blocks or so, from the medical-marijuana souks of Oaksterdam, past the former Lamp Post bar where Bobby Seale used to hang out (now called Interplay Center, where you can “unlock the wisdom of your body”), past Section 8 housing and the site of a founding settlement of the native Ohlone people at the corner of 51st Street, past the Niebyl-Proctor Marxist Library and Akwaba Braiding and a buttload of Ethiopian restaurants, ending in an august jangle at the gates of the Cal campus, and I guess that for a guy who likes hanging around the borderlands—between genres, cultures, musics, legacies, styles—the appeal of Telegraph lies in the way it reflects a local determination to find your path irrespective of boundary lines, picking up what you can, shaking off what you can, along the way.