After the Flood

Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

Robert Polito (View Bio)
Hardcover: Liveright, 2026.

A prevailing narrative of Bob Dylan’s life goes: 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.

"It’s been a long time since I’ve read a book about a major artist that is as much fun—that communicates as much excitement as the author feels for his subject—as Robert Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace. Its provocative argument is that the past 30 years of Bob Dylan’s career are every bit as creative and essential as the first 30—those early years of Dylan’s arrival as a folk revolutionary and a pop star.... After the Flood takes the form of an abecedarium or ‘alphabet book’ — 26 chapters, each beginning with a letter of the alphabet that reveals a topic. The chapter beginning with ‘Q,’ for example, examines quotations Dylan has embedded in his work; chapter ‘R’ discusses how Dylan rewrites and revises. The book is itself a flood of ideas, of information, of emotion. As it proceeds, we begin to learn things about the author: That the writing of this book, for example, was interrupted by an illness that was almost fatal but that also inspired him to make sure he completed it.... Meanwhile, Polito has also edited a newly published Library of America collection of key novels by the noir-fiction master Jim Thompson. That makes sense, since After the Flood renders Dylan the hard-boiled protagonist of his own ever-lengthening career—one long mystery that will never be fully solved. [Polito is the author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, for which he received a National Book Critics Circle Award and an Edgar Award.]" — Ken Tucker, “Fresh Air,” NPR (Read the full review)

"Lyrics, songs, books, a movie script, acceptance speeches, even Mr. Dylan’s paintings and drawings—are the subject of Mr. Polito’s sensitive and meticulously researched book, the most illuminating analysis of the singer-songwriter in years. After the Flood is one of the first works of scholarship to benefit from the thousands of manuscripts now available at the Bob Dylan Center.... Another novel aspect of Mr. Polito’s book is its refreshingly narrow scope. Many books about Mr. Dylan attempt to be comprehensive. The subject of After the Flood is ‘Dylan’s second thirty years,’ from the early 1990s to the present.... The book is enjoyably imperfect.... Yet the pleasures of After the Flood are many: the analysis of Mr. Dylan’s move from guitar to piano in 2002, ‘a shock tactic that instantly located a strange new zone of energy’; a brilliant chapter about Mr. Dylan’s sartorial choices.... Mr. Polito makes sense of how his recent compositional techniques made his art so much less about him, and so much more a portrait of the culture that created him." — Wesley Stace, The Wall Street Journal (Read the full review)

"Drawing on a wealth of archival material, biographer Polito 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 (Read the full review)

"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 (Read the full review)

"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