In 1976, my mother, recently divorced, broke up painfully and protractedly with her first real boyfriend since the collapse of her marriage to my father. I turned thirteen that May, and her birthday present to me was Desire. It was my first Dylan album. I had been talking for a while about this song I'd heard, only once, playing over the speakers in a Washington, D.C., bookstore sometime during the preceding winter. I stood there in the aisle, with a copy of Dune in my hand, trying to catch the lyrics, to guess the singer, to figure out what the hell was happening in the story. I remembered the song like a promising face, vividly and erroneously, for months afterward, without hearing it again, until I unwrapped the disc my mother handed me and put it on the turntable.

Okay, I will say it: Michael Chabon is my favorite contemporary writer. My only hesitation in sharing this is the hesitation of anyone past a certain age to attach himself to that juvenile superlative. My appreciation of his fiction, which, to be honest, has ebbed a bit since Wonder Boys, is eternally renewed whenever I read his nonfiction, new samples of which he regularly adds to the archives at his website, your one-stop shop for all your Chabon needs. The brief remembering of Bob Dylan's Desire (excerpted above) is only the latest one to magically appear since my last visit. Among the myriad topics are comic books (of course), baseball cards, Jose Canseco, more comic books, and Nabokov, just to name a few. His essays really are as beautiful as anything he writes, and you can check out his nonfiction in a monthly column for Details magazine beginning the month before last.