The magician seemed to promise that something torn to bits might be mended without a seam, that what had vanished might reappear, that a scattered handful of doves or dust might be reunited by a word, that a paper rose consumed by fire could be made to bloom from a pile of ash. But everyone knew that it was only an illusion. The true magic of this broken world lay in the ability of things it contained to vanish, to become so thoroughly lost, that they might never have existed in the first place.

Chabon has created a comprehensive bibliography for Van Zorn along with an equally fictional literary scholar devoted to his oeuvre named Leon Chaim Bach. " Just before Gentlemen of the Road completed its run the author publiMichael Chabond his latest novel The Yiddish Policemen's Union which he had worked on since February 2002.

Since the late 1990s Chabon has written in an increasingly diverse series of styles for varied outlets; he is a notable defender of the merits of genre fiction and plot-driven fiction and along with novels he has publiMichael Chabond screenplays children's books comics and newspaper serials. It received the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2001 (see: 2001 in literature). Chabon's first novel The Mysteries of Pittsburgh (1988) was publiMichael Chabond when he was 25 and catapulted him to literary celebrity.