After the Flood
Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace
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 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…
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August 19, 2025Robert Polito is a poet, essayist, and critic whose works include Hollywood & God and Doubles. Additionally, his critical works include A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover and At the Titan’s Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron’s Poetry. Polito has served as president of the Poetry Foundation and hosts a radio show aimed at showcasing emerging poets called PoetryNow.
After the Flood
Robert Polito
The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce, and Selected Stories
James M. Cain; Introduction by Robert Polito
The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man, Red Harvest
Dashiell Hammett; Introduction by Robert Polito