Michael Chabon's Theory of Narrative.

There isn't going to be any hedging here.  Michael Chabon sees himself as a make of worlds.  His second short story collection is A Model World.  His collection of essays on writing is Maps and Legends.

Chabon stitches his worlds together from monomyths and pop culture trivia.  He builds nerd paradises.  Even his most grounded and realistic works, the painfully pubished_MFA_thesis.txt that is Mysteries of Pittsburg and the so much cooler than thou Telegraph Avenue, are peppered with characterful little nods to nerd trivia.  In Mysteries of Pittsburg, the protagonist's father works at the Baxter Building, better known as the home of the Fantastic Four.  The antagonist of Telegraph Avenue, in addition to riding around in a freaking blimp, has a nephew named Feyd, you know, like the guy played by Sting in Lynch's Dune.

And then you get the noir detective novel set in an alternate history Jewish homeland in Alaska or the tale of two sell swords saving tenth century Khazaria from Vikings or the one where the kid from Oregon has to recruit a baseball team to beat Coyote's team of giants and prevent Ragnarok.

Chabon builds these worlds not as escapes, but as crucibles in which to test an idea.  He does this most successfully in his novel about, paradoxically, escapism itself.  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay tells the fictional history of a pair of 1940s Jewish comic book creators in New York City.  In it Chabon chronicles their rise to comic book stardom fueled by the troubles they try to escape from and then their falls, brought about by their reticence to face their troubles head on.

Chabon's themes are clear even if his references are obscure.  The comic character that fuels K&C's success is named the Escapist.  Okay, so his themes are more than clear.  They are right on the nose.

It's that clarity, along with all the nerdy references, that makes me love the works of Michael Chabon.

Also, he wrote "Uptown Funk"

Also, his prose is beautiful.