After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace
Bob Dylan's late career, read as closely as scripture by a critic who has plainly read everything.
Robert Polito works through the albums Dylan has made since the late 1990s, tracing the borrowed lines, Civil War poetry, blues records and old films the songs are assembled from. It is dense and it rambles, which is partly the argument: that Dylan composes by building a memory palace out of other people’s phrases.
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Tyler Cowen
Robert Polito, After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace. An informationally dense, rambling, and frequently insightful and obsessive book about the "late" career period of Bob Dylan.
Source · March 2026
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