Michael Chabon has penned more acclaimed novels than we can reasonably list in this introduction, but Maps and Legends is his first collection of nonfiction. It will be published in May by McSweeney's, to benefit the 826 Valencia writing center. The book collects essays about the writers and artists who have deeply affected Chabon's writing life; not surprisingly for the author of so many genre-bending works of fiction, it makes a passionate case for the ecstasy of influence. Chabon lovingly defends his personal pantheon, which includes everything from the d'Aulaires' books of myths and English ghost stories to Will Eisner, Philip Pullman, and Arthur Conan Doyle. Chabon spoke with Boldtype's Toby Warner about collecting vintage sci-fi and the thrill of fooling a reader.

Boldtype: Have you collected anything unusual over the years?

Michael Chabon: I collect a lot of the usual things. I had a comic-book collection, I had baseball cards — which I still have. Now, the only real collection I pursue is my collection of mid-20th-century, small-press science fiction and fantasy. Like Arkham House, Gnome Press and Fantasy Press, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert Heinlein, and Robert E. Howard. All sorts of cool old anthologies with titles like Adventures in Mutation .

BT: What are some of the collections that have had an impact on you?

MC: When I think of collections, I automatically think of my father, who is a lifelong collector of many things. He really established the pattern in my mind for the proper kind of enthusiastic passion with which you must pursue collecting. I don't have the full-on collector mentality by any means. Many times I've started out, thinking, "These are cool — maybe I should really try to collect some." Often I find that once I have one or two of whatever it might be, I'm fine. So I don't have that completist mentality that most great collectors have, but I definitely learned the art of it at the hands of my dad. Though I don't have the temperament to do it with his enthusiasm and passion, let's just say that when I brought him over and showed him my collection of books, he approved it. He said, "Wow, that's a pretty nice collection." So I felt like I must have done a pretty good job. But I do like having my collection. I sit right next to those books when I work. I look at their beautiful spines, lined up on the shelf next to me, about 25 times an hour. They're stunning. Some of them are so goofy, with robots and rocket ships, and some of them are quite beautiful. I could never be the kind of person who amasses things and then puts them away in a storage space. I have to have stuff around me to be able to enjoy it.

BT: Your latest book, Maps and Legends, is your first collection of nonfiction, but these pieces were written at different times — do you see them as a whole?

MC: Yes, but it came about almost by accident. I was trying to pull together nonfiction pieces I'd written around the theme of manhood — being a father, being a son, being a husband, being a man, generally. I'd given this big pile of nonfiction to my wife to help me sort through. And, in the course of pulling out all the pieces that would go in this prospective other collection, she found more pieces that also went together. She said, "You know, I think you have two books here. There's another one about writing, reading, and the things that you love. You should take a look at it." When I sat down I did feel that these essays somehow belonged together. So those are more or less the ones that are now in Maps and Legends.

BT: Did you rewrite many of the essays?

MC: Yes, definitely. I went back and substantially rewrote a few pieces, somewhat rewrote a few more pieces, somewhat slightly rewrote a few more. But almost nothing made it into the book in its original form. Once I had decided to put them together to publish with McSweeney's and make the book a fundraiser for 826 Valencia, I was lucky I got to work with two really great editors — Dave Eggers and Eli Horowitz, who's the managing editor of McSweeney's. They really helped. They read the pieces with an eye to bringing out the commonalities, to finding places where I could expand — to make you see how M.R. James, the British ghost-story writer, fit in to the overall pattern of the collection. So it turned around the idea of borderlands, of reading and writing at the borderlands. So I went through and asked each piece to stand up and justify its presence in the collection. And if it couldn't fully justify its presence, I would rewrite it so it could. If it could.

BT: Could you explain what you mean by "writing at the borderlands"?

MC: It could mean a lot of different things. The primary sense that I'm interested in is the borderlands among and between various genres of literature that tend to be thought of as being pretty distinct and somewhat impermeable. These are borders that are enforced very stringently in the bookstores of America — where what's mystery must forever remain in the mystery section; what is science fiction must forever remain in the science-fiction section; and Doris Lessing's science-fiction novels are shelved under literature because they're considered "literary." Those borders can seem so firm, but they're actually fairly arbitrary and not especially helpful or descriptive. As soon as you start looking at some of the greatest works of literature of the 20th century, and now the 21st century, it becomes tricky to assign them with any kind of certainty. I think that's actually a mark of the fertility and creativity that can be derived from hanging out along the borders, allowing influences from different sorts of genres to cross over into the work that you're doing. I'm not saying they're meaningless terms at all. They do describe patterns and conventions and formulas and so on. But I think they're granted too great a degree of descriptive control over what writers do and what is considered to be literature.

BT: What are some of the other kinds of borderlands?

MC: There are all kinds. I end up writing about questions of exile and identity. The notion of home plays a large role, along with a range of geographic metaphors: maps, countries, borders, regions, and territories. They could be literary, they could be actually geographic, or they could be biographical, sexual. They all play a role.

BT: What about the audience you had in mind for this collection? There's such a strong current of evangelism in these essays. You explain plots, give background on authors. Did you intend these essays as introductions to the writers and artists you love?

MC: I would definitely like it to work on that level. Especially for the reader who doesn't know a lot about the work of M.R. James, to take an example of a writer who's relatively unknown in this country. I didn't want to be writing for the insider exclusively, but at the same time, I would hope that someone who is very familiar with James' work would still be able to find something he or she hadn't noticed or thought about before.

BT: You have a couple of essays about creations that seem to have gotten away from you. There's your essay on a Yiddish phrase book, which led to The Yiddish Policemen's Union , but not before it met with a lively debate among Yiddish specialists. There's also an expanded version of your famous talk on golems. Were you conscious of taking a risk when you wrote those pieces?

MC: You're asking for it, in a way. Say you're a stage magician, and you tell your audience, "I am now going to saw this woman in half." You know perfectly well that everyone in the audience does not believe you, that everyone knows that there's some kind of trick involved, that you aren't in fact going to be sawing a woman in half. They're going to be watching like hawks, to see just how you perpetrate this charade. You're setting yourself up for failure, by asking people to catch you in the act of fooling them. That can feel a little bit scary sometimes, because the worst possible thing for a novelist would be a reader who just doesn't buy into the particular pack of lies that you're trying to pass off as the truth. So if you haven't succeeded in doing that, then you've really failed. Because, in the reader, you have someone who's really saying, "Please, fool me. I want to believe. I want to fall for your trick." With that kind of willingness, if you fail to satisfy that reader's desire to be fooled, that's bad — that's embarrassing.

BT: What was it like to write about the process of doing that, though? Because you added a postscript to your talk on golems. What was it like to write an explanation of something that was really intended more as a performance?

MC: It was interesting. I tried a few different approaches. I really wanted to look back at that experience, because there were a few people — at least one person — who professed themselves to have been completely snookered, as if I had deliberately been trying to do that. So I looked back on that experience, to see what it all seemed to mean now.

BT: In Maps and Legends, you write about the exhilaration you get when that magic act works, when the audience is fooled.

MC: Right. And the nausea.

BT: So where do those feelings come from?

MC: From having made something. You know, it's golem-making. You put these lumps of clay together in the shape of a human, and you walk around it and chant these alphabetical prayers and spells. If it actually sits up and opens its eyes and gets up and starts walking around — just imagine what that feels like when that works. It's the same thing you'd feel if you were building a computer from scrap. You've put all this effort into welding and soldering all those pieces, which bore no relation to one another before you began to assemble them. At the moment when you turn the switch on, and it boots up, it's an incredible feeling.

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