In the September 2007 issue of Details magazine, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon tells a story about his best friend trying to set him up on a blind date. Chabon’s friend explained, “I told her I knew a Jewish guy who would give her head.” The “her” would eventually become Chabon’s wife. That story is, presumably, non-fiction, but Chabon turned to fiction for his newest novel, the acclaimed The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The book is set in an alternate-universe version of Sitka, Alaska, where millions of European Jews settled after WWII.

Chabon will read from The Yiddish Policemen’s Union today as part of Inprint’s Brown Reading Series. Inprint’s executive director Rich Levy describes Chabon’s hard-boiled detective novel as Chandler-esque, with “a thick impasto of Yiddish slang on top of it all, and it’s funny; it’s based on this wild leap of imagination, and it works.” If you think you know Chabon’s name, you probably do. He previously wrote Wonder Boys (which was later made into a movie), and he wrote about a third of the screenplay for Spider-Man 2. And then there was that Pulitzer. A book sale and signing will follow the reading.

Mon., Sept. 10, 7:30 p.m.

This article appears in Sep 6-12, 2007.