Michael Chabon may be the best author today at making vivid his most wild, and personal, imaginings. Who else could take readers to a post-World War II where Jews have migrated to Alaska and created a society that is darkly fantastic and devastatingly real – and then make it a fine detective novel with a Jewish Bogart with his own Maltese Falcon in the form of the dead body of a drug-addicted chess player who may just be the Messiah? This description is not even the genesis of how bizarrely fantastic The Yiddish Policemen's Union is.