Summerland

Baseball has long inspired works of fantasy and magical realism, such as W. P. Kinsella’s 1982 novel Shoeless Joe (which inspired the 1989 film Field of Dreams). In Summerland, Michael Chabon combines the game of baseball with elements from mythologies across various cultures to create a world that elevates baseball from a simple game to a test of valor that is used to gain status and settle conflicts. The novel’s Tree of Worlds most prominently references the World Tree of Norse myth and represents the concept of life existing along the ever-expanding branches of a great tree. Within the four worlds of the novel, Chabon explores the light and dark courts of the fae worlds (the Summerlands and Winterlands), as well as Middling (the human realm based on Midgard from Norse myth), and the realm of the gods, which was locked away thousands of years before Summerland takes place in order to set the stage for the battle between chaos and order. Coyote is a prominent figure from Indigenous American myth, known as both a trickster and a figure who provided innovations to humans, always with a price.