Telegraph Avenue Michael Chabon by Michael Chabon 9780062206541, 0062206540 instant download after payment.

Imaginative, funny, moving, and triumphant, this is Michael Chabon's most dazzling book yet 

"The novel's central metaphor is jazz, soul and funk music: how it saturates the lives of those who make it, how it shapes the sensibilities of those who obsessively consume and collect it, and how it nurtures fervent, fractious communities like the one that exists in and around Brokeland..."  -  NPR

As the summer of 2004 draws to a close, Archy Stallings and Nat Jaffe are still hanging in there, long-time friends, bandmates and co-regents of Brokeland Records, a kingdom of used vinyl located in the sketchy yet freewheeling borderlands of Berkeley and Oakland. Archy and his wife, Gwen, are expecting their first baby; Nat and Aviva have a teenage son, Julius. 

Cranky, flawed and loving each other with all the fierceness we've come to expect of Chabon characters, Archy and Nat have worked to construct lives and livelihoods that have a groove, looking to connect across barriers of race and class, and clinging to a sense of order and security through their stubbornly old-school ways. When ex-NFL quarterback Gibson Goode, the fourth-richest black man in America, announces plans to construct his latest Dogpile megastore on a nearby neglected stretch of Telegraph Avenue, Nat and Archy fear it means certain doom for their vulnerable little enterprise. 

"In end-of-an-era epic celebrating the bygone glories of vinyl records, comic-book heroes and blaxploitation flicks in a world gone digital... The evocation of “Useless, by James Joyce” attests to the humour and ambition of the novel, as if this were a Joyce-an remix with a hipper rhythm track."  -  Kirkus Reviews

What they don't know is that Goode's announcement marks the climax of a decades-old secret history encompassing a forgotten crime of the Black Panther era, the tragedy of Archy's own deadbeat father and the perpetual shining failure of American optimism about race.