One 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 the little girl’s life. When they find themselves scattered and strewn across two continents, a mysterious stranger with a secret appears, who sends the story spiraling forty years into the past.
At once immediate and epic, funny and devastating, this new novel by the author of Zeroville is a transcendent dispatch from the intersection of art and politics, passion and memory. Sweeping from 1960s London and ‘70s Berlin to Twenty-First Century California, and the ground zero of civilization called Ethiopia, These Dreams of You chronicles not only a family struggling to salvage its bonds but a desperate, defiant four-year-old whose body is a radio, a future rhythm & blues that circles “the sphere of time,” and a nation alighting from its leap of imagination.
Steve Erickson
Steve Erickson is the author of several novels, including Tours of the Black Clock, Rubicon Beach, The Sea Came in at Midnight, Our Ecstatic Days, and Arc d’X. His books have been translated into a dozen languages. He is the film critic for Los Angeles magazine and editor of the literary journal Black Clock, which is published by CalArts where he teaches writing. He lives with his family in Topanga Canyon.