conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is a plot for a book about Joe, Sammy, Clay entitled The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay? Start with the sentence 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman'.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay: The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin, Sammy Klayman.\nWith the help of his mentor, Kornblum, Joe escapes Prague by hiding in a coffin, an effort initially conceived in order to smuggle the inanimate Golem of Prague to safety, out of the collections of Munich or Berlin.\nHaving escaped Prague, Josef leaves behind the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas.\nAs the novel develops, both Sammy and Josef find their creative niches, one entrepreneurial, the latter\'s artistic.\nBeyond having a shared interest in drawing, Sammy and Joe share several connections to Jewish stage magician Harry Houdini: Josef (like comics legend Jim Steranko) studied magic and escapology in Prague, which aided him in his departure from Europe; Sammy is the son of the Mighty Molecule, a strongman on the vaudeville circuit.\nWhen Sammy discovers Joe\'s artistic talent, Sammy gets Joe a job as an illustrator for a novelty products company, Empire Novelty.\nSheldon Anapol, owner of Empire, motivated to share in the recent cultural and financial success of Superman, attempts to break into the comic-book business on the creative backs of Sammy and Josef.\nUnder the name "Sam Clay", Sammy starts writing adventure stories with Joe illustrating them, and the two recruit several other Brooklyn teenagers to produce Amazing Midget Radio Comics (named to promote one of the company\'s novelty items).\nThe pair is at once passionate about their creation, earnestly optimistic about making money, and always nervous about the opinion of their employers.\nThe magazine features Sammy and Joe\'s character, the Escapist, an anti-fascist superhero who combines traits of (among others) Captain America, Harry Houdini, Batman, the Phantom, and the Scarlet Pimpernel.\nThe Escapist becomes tremendously popular, but like talent behind Superman, the writers and artists of the comic get a minimal share of their publisher\'s revenue.\nSammy and Joe are slow to realize that they are being exploited, as they have private concerns: Joe is trying to help his family escape from Nazi-occupied Prague, and has fallen in love with the bohemian Rosa Saks, who has her own artistic aspirations, while Clay works to find his sexual identity and seeks progress in his professional and literary career.\nFor many months after coming to New York, Joe is driven by an intense desire to improve the condition of his family, still living under a regime increasingly hostile to their kind.\nThis drive shows through in his work, which remains for a long time violently anti-Nazi despite his employer\'s concerns.\nIn the meantime, he is spending more and more time with Rosa, appearing as a magician in the bar mitzvahs of the children of Rosa\'s father\'s acquaintances, even though he sometimes feels guilty at indulging in these distractions from the primary task of fighting for his family.\nAfter multiple attempts and considerable monetary sacrifice, Joe ultimately fails to get his family to the States, his last attempt having resulted in putting his younger brother aboard a ship that was destroyed by a German U-boat.\nDistraught and unaware that Rosa is pregnant with his child, Joe enlists in the navy, hoping to fight the Germans.\nInstead, he is sent to a secluded naval base in Antarctica.\nAfter a faulty chimney fills the base with carbon monoxide, Josef emerges from this interlude the lone survivor from his station.\nWhen he makes it back to New York, ashamed to show his face again to Rosa and Sammy, he lives and sleeps in a hideout in the Empire State Building, known only to a small circle of magician-friends.\nMeanwhile, Sam develops a romantic relationship with the radio voice of The Escapist, Tracy Bacon.\nBacon\'s movie-star good looks initially intimidate Clay, but later they fall in love.\nWhen Tracy is cast as The Escapist in the film adaptation of the now-popular franchise, he invites Clay to move to Hollywood with him, an offer that Clay accepts.\nBut later, when Bacon and Clay go to a friend\'s beach house with several other gay couples, the private dinner is raided by the local police as well as two off-duty FBI agents.\nAll of the men at the party are arrested, except for two who hid under the dinner table, one of whom is Sam Clay.\nThe FBI agents use their authority to sexually abuse Sam and the other man.\nAfter this episode, Clay decides that he can\'t live with the constant threat of being persecuted because of his relationship with Tracy; he does not travel with Bacon.\nSome time after Joe leaves, Sammy marries Rosa and moves with her to the suburbs, where they raise her son Tommy in what outwardly appears to be a typical traditional nuclear family.\nSammy and Rosa cannot hide all their secrets from Tommy, however, who manages to take private magic lessons in the Empire State Building from Joe for the better part of year without anyone else\'s knowledge.\nTommy is instrumental in finally reuniting the Kavalier and Clay duo, which works with renewed enthusiasm to find a new creative direction for comics.\nJoe moves into Sammy and Rosa\'s house.\nShortly afterwards, Sammy\'s homosexuality is revealed on public television.\nThis further complicates the attempts of Rosa, Sammy, and Joe to reconstitute a family.\nIn the end, despite Joe and Rosa\'s efforts to convince Sammy to stay, he leaves the house in the middle of the night without saying goodbye.\nMany events in the novel are based on the lives of actual comic-book creators including Jack Kirby (to whom the book is dedicated in the afterword), Bob Kane, Stan Lee, Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Joe Simon, Will Eisner, and Jim Steranko.\nOther historical figures play minor roles, including Salvador Dalí, Al Smith, Orson Welles, and Fredric Wertham.\nThe novel\'s time span roughly mirrors that of the Golden Age of Comics itself, starting from shortly after the debut of Superman and concluding with the Kefauver Senate hearings, two events often used to demarcate the era.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first four paragraphs for the book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  T **HE LAST LETTER** that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor's pen across the text):
  It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with hope. With Thomas gone we have nothing to live for, it seems, but the knowledge that he is on his way to be with you in that fortunate nation which has already so kindly received you in its bosom.
  Please, Josef, do not continue to trouble yourself or waste your time attempting to win for us what you have, with the help of your friends, been able to attain for your brother. It is enough; more than enough. Your late father, as you know, suffered from chronic optimism, but it is clear to me and to anyone not foolish or addled by deafness that we  and that the present state of affairs will be as permanent as any of us shall require. You must make a life for yourself there, with your brother, and turn your thoughts from us and from.
  I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music. But for you to waste another moment in worrying about us in this city of ! No.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
  T **HE LAST LETTER** that Joe was ever to receive from his mother, mailed from the Ostrovni Street post office, as the laws required, between the hours of one and three in the afternoon, read as follows (the black marks trace the brusque transit of the censor's pen across the text):
  It is a puzzle worthy of the best psychiatrist that a human life can be so utterly void and at the same time filled to bursting with hope. With Thomas gone we have nothing to live for, it seems, but the knowledge that he is on his way to be with you in that fortunate nation which has already so kindly received you in its bosom.
  Please, Josef, do not continue to trouble yourself or waste your time attempting to win for us what you have, with the help of your friends, been able to attain for your brother. It is enough; more than enough. Your late father, as you know, suffered from chronic optimism, but it is clear to me and to anyone not foolish or addled by deafness that we  and that the present state of affairs will be as permanent as any of us shall require. You must make a life for yourself there, with your brother, and turn your thoughts from us and from.
  I have not had word from you for three months, and while I am certain that you continue to write faithfully I take this silence however unintentional as a suggestion. In all likelihood this letter will not find you but if you are reading this, then please. Listen to me. I want you to forget us, Josef, to leave us behind once and for all. It is not in your nature to do so, but you must. They say that ghosts find it painful to haunt the living, and I am tormented by the idea that our tedious existence should dim or impair your enjoyment of your own young life. That the reverse situation should obtain is fair and proper, and you cannot imagine how I delight in picturing you standing on some bright, busy street corner in that city of freedom and swing music.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is four more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense. For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced. He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward. Then the man smiled.
  The man nodded solemnly. "One we must respect." He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be.
  There was a gritty scratch of leather sole against linoleum. Cousin Joe glanced up and smiled a brittle adult smile, eyes shifting uneasily to one side.
  Tommy had always taken the particularity, the enduring intensity, of his mother's memories of Joe as a matter of course, but then one afternoon the previous summer, at the beach, he had overheard Eugene's mother talking to another neighborhood woman. Tommy, feigning sleep on his towel, lay eavesdropping on the hushed conversation. It was hard to follow, but one phrase caught his ear and lodged there for many weeks afterward.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Swap the first and the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: It was hard to follow, but one phrase caught his ear and lodged there for many weeks afterward. For one instant he hung there, shoulders hunched, red-faced. He looked as if he were planning to flee; that was another thing Tommy remembered afterward. Then the man smiled.
  The man nodded solemnly. "One we must respect." He reached into his pocket and took out a package of Old Gold cigarettes. He lit one with a snap of his lighter and inhaled slowly, his eyes on Tommy, his expression troubled, as Tommy somehow expected it to be.
  There was a gritty scratch of leather sole against linoleum. Cousin Joe glanced up and smiled a brittle adult smile, eyes shifting uneasily to one side.
  Tommy had always taken the particularity, the enduring intensity, of his mother's memories of Joe as a matter of course, but then one afternoon the previous summer, at the beach, he had overheard Eugene's mother talking to another neighborhood woman. Tommy, feigning sleep on his towel, lay eavesdropping on the hushed conversation.When the man realized that Tommy was staring at him, he gave up his pretense.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last four paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Brian K. Vaughan looked shocked, almost put out, as if his middle initial represented a grave and powerful mystery of which he had hitherto believed himself the sole initiate. "Yeah," he said wonderingly.
  Mrs. Kavalier reached out to take my hand and then held on to it, giving it an occasional shake to punctuate some point she was trying to make, for the rest of my visit. "You can't talk to Sam," she said. "He's drawing. He can't draw and talk at the same time."
  In its day of glory Mr. Clay was the writing half, with Joe Kavalier, of the team of Kavalier & Clay. He and his late partner were the creators of the Escapist, a costumed crimefighter of the 1940s whose sales at one time rivaled those of such titans as Superman, Batman, and the great captains, America and Marvel. In the early forties, the combination of Mr. Kavalier's stylish pyrotechnics with layout and composition and Mr. Clay's sometimes didactic, sometimes touching, always clever scripts was the envy of their peers.
  Finally I found the nerve to ask to see what Mr. Clay had been drawing all this time. He took another second to squint at the board, then turned it to me. It was a drawing of the Houdiniesque Escapist, executed in a competent if somewhat dated style, brandishing the magical golden key from which his powers derive. Mr. Clay had portrayed him as a smiling, big-muscled hero with a cartoonishly cleft chin.