Robert Polito will tell the story of Bob Dylan’s career from the early 1990s to today in a new book.
Liveright will publish Polito’s After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace next year, the press announced in a news release. It calls the book “both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.”
Polito, a poet and essayist who founded the New School Graduate Writing Program in New York, is the author of Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson, which won the 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. He has written extensively about Dylan, contributing essays to books including The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan and Studio A: The Bob Dylan Reader.
“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,” Liveright says of the book. “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.”
After the Flood is scheduled for publication on January 27, 2026.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
