Overview

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s, then released arguably the worst music of his career 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 and biographer 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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9780871402936

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Reviews

In Robert Polito's hands, Bob Dylan's recordings, performances, films, and writings, especially of the last thirty-some years, open up like plants caught in time-lapse photography. You see how they take shape, hear the different languages they speak, until the maze of allusions that makes up the work resolves itself into a single body--in Colson Whitehead's words on all the variants of 'John Henry, ' 'a whole country of songs.'--Greil Marcus Probing ineffable matters of the heart and mind and ear, Robert Polito eloquently interweaves memory and cultural history in this brilliant analysis of Bob Dylan's later career. A uniquely incandescent book; a book that's hilarious, humane, generous, often poignant; a book about Dylan, and about us; and a book not to be missed.--Brenda Wineapple Robert Polito's explorations of human duality--in the esoteric poetics of James Merrill, in Jim Thompson's pulpiest fiction, and in his own chilling poems--have primed us for this grand tour of Bob Dylan's memory palace. Part biography, part explication, this is a brilliant, consequential, deliciously encyclopedic foray through the winding artistic corridors of one of the most surprising and controversial recipients of literature's most honored prize.--Lloyd Schwartz Robert Polito's After the Flood is the last word on the second half of Bob Dylan's career. Encyclopedic yet concise, it is an ideal listening companion and a definitive guide to Dylan's many reinventions. Unlike much Dylanology, it's also a lot of fun.--Lucy Sante

Author Information

Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. The founding director of the Graduate Writing and Writing and Democracy Programs at the New School, Polito teaches writing and literature. For his book Savage Art, he was awarded the NBCC Award in Biography.

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