Bob Dylan: Chronicles: Volume One

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

The celebrated first memoir from arguably the most influential singer-songwriter in the country, Bob Dylan.

"I'd come from a long ways off and had started a long ways down. But now destiny was about to manifest itself. I felt like it was looking right at me and nobody else."

So writes Bob Dylan in Chronicles: Volume One, his remarkable book exploring critical junctures in his life and career.

A Journey Through Time and Place

Through Dylan’s eyes and open mind, we see Greenwich Village, circa 1961, when he first arrives in Manhattan. Dylan’s New York is a magical city of possibilities:

• Smoky, nightlong parties
• Literary awakenings
• Transient loves
• Unbreakable friendships

Elegiac observations are punctuated by jabs of memories, penetrating and tough. With the book’s side trips to New Orleans, Woodstock, Minnesota, and points west, Chronicles: Volume One is an intimate and intensely personal recollection of extraordinary times.

A Poignant Reflection

By turns revealing, poetical, passionate, and witty, Chronicles: Volume One is a mesmerizing window into Bob Dylan’s thoughts and influences. Dylan’s voice is distinctively American:

• Generous of spirit
• Engaged
• Fanciful
• Rhythmic

Utilizing his unparalleled gifts of storytelling and the exquisite expressiveness that are the hallmarks of his music, Bob Dylan turns Chronicles: Volume One into a poignant reflection on life and the people and places that helped shape the man and the art.

Critical Acclaim

• "Chronicles stunned everyone . . . [it's] clear, apparently frank, unremittingly serious about his musical influences and exquisitely written. It is, in fact, a masterpiece." — Sunday Times
• "Entertaining and surprisingly deprecating... The book's structure is elegant . . . Chronicles is tautly written, vividly cinematic, and funny . . . a courageous little book." — Financial Times
• "There is something on every page, in every paragraph, that demands attention . . . In rock and roll terms, this book is like discovering the lost diaries of Shakespeare. It may be the most extraordinarily intimate autobiography by a 20th-century legend." — Daily Telegraph