Bøker av Robert Polito

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed 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 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.

From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today's Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton, this book tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who we think we are, fade in and out of consciousness.