{"product_id":"after-the-flood-inside-bob-dylans-memory-palace-hardcover","title":"After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace - Hardcover","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp style=\"text-align: right;\"\u003e\u003ca href=\"https:\/\/reportcopyrightinfringement.com\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow\"\u003e\u003cb\u003eReport copyright infringement\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/a\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e\u003cp\u003eby \u003cb\u003eRobert Polito\u003c\/b\u003e (Author)\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e That is not this story.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Here, instead, is Dylan's \u003cem\u003esecond\u003c\/em\u003e 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--\u003cem\u003eAfter the Flood\u003c\/em\u003e reveals Dylan's creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e 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on thousands of pages from Dylan's newly opened archive in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and anatomizing hundreds of published and unpublished lyrics, liner notes, and more, celebrated poet and biographer Robert Polito demonstrates how Dylan evolved a late musical style that has equally embodied and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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Between \u003cem\u003eGood as I Been to You\u003c\/em\u003e (1992) and \u003cem\u003eShadow Kingdom\u003c\/em\u003e (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.\"\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e Imaginatively researched, boldly arranged, and with elegiac insights into the cunning behind his songs, \u003cem\u003eAfter the Flood\u003c\/em\u003e is an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga, and a must-read for all Dylan enthusiasts.\u003c\/p\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eNumber of Pages:\u003c\/strong\u003e 384\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003eDimensions:\u003c\/strong\u003e 1.12 x 9.24 x 6.36 IN\u003c\/div\u003e\n            \u003cdiv\u003e\n\u003cstrong\u003ePublication Date:\u003c\/strong\u003e January 27, 2026\u003c\/div\u003e\n            ","brand":"BooksCloud","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":51987440435501,"sku":"9780871402936","price":30.58,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0938\/3185\/6429\/files\/lHwKJtMpu69780871402936.webp?v=1776178718","url":"https:\/\/ishookbooks.com\/products\/after-the-flood-inside-bob-dylans-memory-palace-hardcover","provider":"iShook Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}