The Chronicle of Stolen Dreams

Fiction. Music. Literary Nonfiction. Nick Blake has just returned from the battlefields of Europe and is part of a lost generation trying to make its way in postwar America. As he sets out on a journey across the country, the summer of 1947 comes alive in a mind-bending, history-altering romp. Nick witnesses the birth of electric blues in Chicago, encounters the first members of the Beat Generation taking to the road, gets caught up with the original motorcycle gang invading small-town...
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Fiction. Music. Literary Nonfiction. Nick Blake has just returned from the battlefields of Europe and is part of a lost generation trying to make its way in postwar America. As he sets out on a journey across the country, the summer of 1947 comes alive in a mind-bending, history-altering romp. Nick witnesses the birth of electric blues in Chicago, encounters the first members of the Beat Generation taking to the road, gets caught up with the original motorcycle gang invading small-town America, and is party to the first sightings of UFOs across the Midwestern skies. Along the way, he encounters a young Muddy Waters, an even younger Jack Kerouac, and a blues- loving, harmonica-playing alien named Jaxson Epsilon, the most unusual character of them all. Jaxson has a secret that is about to change the course of human history as he endeavors to alter the dreams of every man, woman, and child for generations to come.

"Terry Tarnoff is an absolute master storyteller--he could tell me a tale of taking the garbage out and I'd sit listening spellbound. But he's also a fearfully brilliant, comic genius, and when you put the two together you might think that Kurt Vonnegut had briefly returned from the dead. Throw in a little New Age madness, a little Beat degeneracy, a bit of mouth-watering esculence on a par with Ruth Reichl, and a little pure lyric poetry, and you have THE CHRONICLE OF STOLEN DREAMS."--Gerald Nicosia

"An ingenious tour de force of an 'on the road' that precedes Kerouac's and includes rocket ships during the McCarthy period after WW2. Tarnoff has created a cast of unforgettable characters--in space and on earth, and in this book the two very definitely and dramatically are conjoined. Tarnoff's use of the self-conscious narrator only adds to the lightheartedness of the text, and his writing, whether of Chicago blues musicians or of the wackiness of all the wanderers in this chronicle, is brilliant."--Jack Hirschman

"Ever since THE BONE MAN OF BENARES I've regarded Terry Tarnoff as a gifted scribe, fellow traveler and blues brother; but with THE CHRONICLE OF STOLEN DREAMS he takes it exponentially further on down the road. Equal parts beat, blues, Roswell sci-fi and road-trip hilarity, Stolen Dreams introduces us to a decidedly off-kilter galaxy that includes world-weary WWII vets, 1947 Chicago gangsters, not one but two harmonica-playing protagonists, and a wonderfully haywire plot involving cranial brain-travel and dream-energy extraction. Featuring a host of quirky extra-terrestrials, a beer- drenched pool game with Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac, a Gypsy beatnik barfly and a smart-alecky harmonica-playing alien from Obsidia, and with cameos by Muddy Waters and Willie Dixon, well, all I can say is... C'mon... baby, don't you wanna go?"--Tom Ball