Read an Excerpt From Michael Chabon’s New Novel, Telegraph Avenue

Telegraph Avenue, which comes out Sept. 11, is about two men of different races running a record store on the street that connects Berkeley and Oakland — and their wives, partners in a midwifery business. It’s also about Quentin Tarantino, gentrification, and the uncertain fate of America’s integrationist experiment. Chabon couldn’t help but include a very on-topic cameo — the future President Obama, in 2004, comforting one of the novel’s central characters, Gwen, in the midst of the toughest of pregnancies (the kind where your husband’s just been caught cheating, you’ve been told you’re worthless as a midwife by an insufferable yuppie doctor, and a musical genius you love has just up and died).

Just before his hostess for the evening, who held the patent on a gene that coded for a protein to prevent the rejection of a transplanted kidney, directed everyone to gather under the carved and stenciled fir beams of her living room, and sent the young woman from the campaign out to tell the band to knock it off for ten minutes so that the state senator, Obama of Illinois, could address his fellow guests, each of whom had contributed at least one thousand dollars to attend this event, an address in which he would attempt by measured words and a calm demeanor to reassure them (vainly and mistakenly, as it would turn out) that their candidate for the presidency of the United States would not go down to inglorious defeat in November, Obama stopped in the doorway that opened onto the flagstone patio to listen for a minute to the hired band. They were cooking their way with evident seriousness of intent through an instrumental cover of “Higher Ground.”

Read the full excerpt at Vulture.