A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counter-culture, 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 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. Imaginatively researched, After the Flood is both an essential revision and continuation of the Dylan saga.

"I’m keen to get my hands on [After the Flood]" -- Ian Thomson - New Statesman, ’This year’s best non-fiction’
"After the Flood is no mere index, as Polito brings a scholastic zeal and care into unlinking the chains of sources, references, and memories Dylan has employed in his astounding run. It is a feat of hyper-attuned reading and listening, of being dazzled by a forest and then demanding to know what made the trees." -- Grayson Haver Currin - Mojo
"This excavation is not for the faint of heart or casual fan, but should you wish to discover how much rewriting went into the reputation-restoring Time Out Of Mind, or the depth of reference that makes Love And Theft so special, then look no further." -- Pat Carty - Classic Rock
"While it’s impossible to imagine Dylan ever reading a book about himself, I suspect he’d get a kick out of this one. It’s thoughtful, enlightening, slightly offbeat and never dull." -- Paul Whitelaw - Big Issue

Robert Polito served as president of the Poetry Foundation from 2013 to 2015. The founding director of the Graduate Writing and Writing and Democracy Programs at the New School, Polito teaches writing and literature. For his book Savage Art, he was awarded the NBCC Award in Biography.