 | These Dreams of YouOne November night in a canyon outside L.A., Zan Nordhoc — a failed novelist turned pirate-radio DJ — sits before the television with his small, adopted black daughter, watching the election of his country's first black president. In the nova of this historic moment, with an economic recession threatening their home, Zan, his wife and their son set out to solve the enigma of a little girl whose body is a radio, broadcasting a future rhythm & blues that circles the sphere of time. Scattered across two continents, the family meets a mysterious stranger with a secret who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past, from '60s London to '70s Berlin, from the ground zero of civilization to a New World mid-air in its leap of imagination. "Truly
electrifying. In its gorgeous, vivid prose and its acutely sensitive soul, These Dreams of
You shows us just what a novel can still do in our own crazy times." "A striking piece of work, fast-moving and far-reaching." "Raises questions, even (or especially) if it can't answer them. It's in the asking, after all, that literature is made."
"Drama filled with
exuberance... the story is wild enough to do justice to the paradoxes and swings of our
'democrazy.' Erickson's jagged, jazzy voice is his own." "Hypnotic...powerful...makes us wonder and cheer
enthusiastically about the strange and more than coincidental thing we call life itself." "Actions echo across time, continents and realities...a series of endless,
astounding tessellations." "Beautiful, elegiac, with mazes and labyrinths both real and imagined...a complex and
imaginative tapestry about family and identity." "Erickson's skillful use of metafictional techniques,
coincidences and resonances expands the story into an absorbing meditation on narrative
itself." "Superb. Pushes against the idea of the novel as a stagnated medium by flexing its own
vitality." "Magnificent. A big novel
of big ideas... As readers rush headlong
toward its climax, they may feel as if emerged from a fever dream." "I am astonished at the emotions this book let flood through my head and heart." "May well be
today's Great American Novel... the final, choking
passage belongs in the same league as the conclusions of The Great Gatsby, On the
Road and Vineland."  |
