Home Books After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

by Robert Polito

Liveright ·2026 ·384 pages ·Culture
Maybe Someday
Maybe Someday
I Index
48/99
Near the Top

65/99

Critics

Maybe Someday

32/99

Readers

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Scholars

96/99

Rating

34/99

Volume

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Rating

47/99

Volume

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About This Book

Blending biography and archival history, After the Flood asks of Bob Dylan, "If your dreams are fulfilled at twenty, what do you do with the rest of your life?" A prevailing narrative Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed in the 1980s—only to be resurrected in 2016, when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Dylan's concerts once began with an announcer intoning a deadpan version of just such a narrative. That is not this story. Drawing on thousands of pages of archival materials, After the Flood reveals Dylan's output during the last three decades as his most ambitious yet. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since the early 1990s, celebrated poet Robert Polito shows how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has embodied and resisted its era—interweaving Ovid and Americana, film noir and the Civil War. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.


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Reviews

"Is Polito's approach challenging at times?"

David Kirby· The Washington Post Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"A dive into Bob Dylan's late career has produced the best book on the musician in ages."

Wesley Stace· The Wall Street Journal Top of the Pile

"An insightful look at Dylan's lesser-known works, in all their multitudes."

Kirkus Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Dylan devotees couldn't ask for a more thorough consideration of an under-studied part of his oeuvre"

Publishers Weekly Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

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