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
Description
Description
A familiar 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 controversially 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.
Here, instead, is Dylan's second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991--since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over--After the Flood reveals Dylan's creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.
Drawing on thousands of pages from Dylan's newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and resisted its era, interweaving folk process and American and world history, and transforming spectral cultural memory into devastating inspiration. Polito thus establishes Dylan as an intensely literary songwriter whose recent writings, especially, are dynamic, intricate, and far-reaching collages.
Between Good as I Been to You (1992) and Shadow Kingdom (2023), across Desert Storm, 9/11, and COVID-19, Polito shows that Dylan revitalized lines and contexts from sources as diverse as classical Greece and Rome, the American Civil War, and film noir, tipping Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, into Muddy Waters; slanting Herman Melville, John Winthrop, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Al Jolson; and secreting Marcel Proust into his own literal California backyard--to touch on just a few of the storerooms inside Dylan's astonishing "memory palace."
Imaginatively researched, boldly arranged, and with elegiac insights into the cunning behind his songs, After the Flood is an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga, and a must-read for all Dylan enthusiasts.
That is not this story.
Here, instead, is Dylan's second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991--since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over--After the Flood reveals Dylan's creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.
Drawing on thousands of pages from Dylan's newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and resisted its era, interweaving folk process and American and world history, and transforming spectral cultural memory into devastating inspiration. Polito thus establishes Dylan as an intensely literary songwriter whose recent writings, especially, are dynamic, intricate, and far-reaching collages.
Between Good as I Been to You (1992) and Shadow Kingdom (2023), across Desert Storm, 9/11, and COVID-19, Polito shows that Dylan revitalized lines and contexts from sources as diverse as classical Greece and Rome, the American Civil War, and film noir, tipping Henry Timrod, poet laureate of the Confederacy, into Muddy Waters; slanting Herman Melville, John Winthrop, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow into Stephen Foster, Dan Emmett, and Al Jolson; and secreting Marcel Proust into his own literal California backyard--to touch on just a few of the storerooms inside Dylan's astonishing "memory palace."
Imaginatively researched, boldly arranged, and with elegiac insights into the cunning behind his songs, After the Flood is an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga, and a must-read for all Dylan enthusiasts.
Critical Reviews
Critical 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 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
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
Drawing on a wealth of archival material, biographer Polito (Savage Art) reframes Bob Dylan's "second thirty years" as a period of unprecedented creativity and growth . . . Intimate details and astute critiques coalesce into a rich portrait of an artist ceaselessly remaking himself. Dylan devotees couldn't ask for a more thorough consideration of an under-studied part of his oeuvre.-- "Publishers Weekly"
A ramble through the latter-day work of the ever-estimable Bob Dylan . . . Dylan is an elusive figure in his own story; as Polito sagely notes, he may have begun his renaissance with a Keith Richards-like earring and black leather jacket, but he soon would dress in hoodies and eye-hiding hats and sunglasses 'that declared he didn't want to be there.' Yet Dylan was there, always, almost ubiquitous . . . An insightful look at Dylan's lesser-known works, in all their multitudes.-- "Kirkus Reviews"
After the Flood is no mere index, as Polito brings a scholastic zeal and care into unlinking the chains of sources, references, and memories Dylan has employed in his astounding run. It is a feat of hyper-attuned reading and listening, of being dazzled by a forest and then demanding to know what made the trees.--Grayson Haver Currin "Mojo"
"I'm keen to get my hands on [After the Flood]."--Ian Thomson, New Statesman, 'This year's best non-fiction'
Publishing Information
Publishing Information
Publisher:
Liveright Publishing Corporation
Pub date:
2026-01-27
Length:
384 pages
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