In 1939, Czech refugee and trained magician Josef Kavalier escapes Nazi-occupied Prague and joins his Brooklyn cousin Sammy Clay to break into the fledgling comic book business. Together they create the Escapist, a costumed hero built from Joe's own longing to free his family from Europe, and ride the industry's boom through fortune, censorship hearings, and war. Spanning two decades of New York's Golden Age of comics, the novel follows the cousins through love, loss, and reinvention as their invented heroics collide with real-world catastrophe.
Books mentioned in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (7)
The Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg: “he saw that Joe had fallen asleep in the armchair with one of his dusty old books on Kabbalah or whatever it was—Volume IV of Ginzberg’s Legends of the Jews—pitched like a tent on his lap.”
Gladiator by Philip Wylie: “in particular from Philip Wylie, whose Hugo Danner was the bulletproof superhuman hero of his novel Gladiator; from Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose orphaned hero, young Lord Greystoke, grew up to become Tarzan...”
The Importance of Being Earnest by Oscar Wilde: “a friend of Tracy Bacon, whose first work in New York had been with the Mercury Theatre, playing the role of Algernon in Welles’s radio production of The Importance of Being Earnest.”
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais: ““I haven’t seen one of those in years.” * Gargantua and Pantagruel, and possibly Vathek.”
Vathek by William Beckford: ““I haven’t seen one of those in years.” * Gargantua and Pantagruel, and possibly Vathek.”
Howards End by E. M. Forster: “an absolute requirement, which can lead to the mild panic reflected in the first sentence of Howards End: One has to begin somewhere.”