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Join us for a reading and conversation with author and Professor of Writing at The New School, Robert Polito, as he sits down with John Reed to talk about Polito's new work After the Flood.
Moderated by John Reed, Director of the Creative Writing Program and Associate Professor of Writing Across Media.
About the Book:
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 familiar 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 controversially 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.
Here, instead, is Dylan’s second thirty years. Across an abecedarium of chapters surveying his albums, performances, films, and books since 1991—since that rainy February night in New York City when Dylan, then forty-nine, accepted a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, signaling in effect that his extraordinary vocation as a vital and indispensable creative force had ended, was over—After the Flood reveals Dylan’s creative output during the last three decades as his most ambitious and accomplished yet.
"In Robert Polito's Hands, Bob Dylan's recordings, performances, films, and writings, especially of the last thirty-some years, open up like plants caught in a time-lapse photography. You see how they take shape, hear the different languages they speak, until the maze of allusions that makes up the work resolves itself into a single body -- in Colson Whitehead's words on all the variants of 'John Henry,' 'a whole country of songs.'" -- Greil Marcus
"Probbing ineffable matters of the heart and mind and ear, Robert Polito eloquently interweaves memory and cultural history in this brilliant analysis of Bob Dylan's later career. A uniquely incandescent book; a book that's hilarious, humane, generous, often poignant; a book about Dylan, and about us; a book not to be missed." -- Brenda Wineapple
Presented by the Creative Writing Program at The New School for Social Research.
Robert Polito will publish three books in 2026: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright); Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books). Previous books include Savage Art, a biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collections Hollywood & God and Doubles. He edited Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, for the Library of America, and in collaboration with filmmaker Michael Almereyda and novelist Jonathan Lethem edited Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings.
The New School offered the first academic creative writing workshop in 1931 and pioneered a new philosophy of education. The idea: students would make their own lives and their own stories part of their education. Today, The New School continues to celebrate and cultivate daring and diverse new voices through its Creative Writing program. The value of this approach is reflected in the publications and achievements of our MFA Creative Writing graduates and faculty.
Visit New School Writing, the blog of the MFA Creative Writing Program, for interviews, profiles, and a digital bookshelf featuring the New School writing community.
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Robert Polito will publish three books in 2026: After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan’s Memory Palace (Liveright); Jim Thompson: Five Noir Novels of the 1950s & 1960s (Library of America); and, in collaboration with Sophie Brown and Robert Rubin, Barbara Loden’s WANDA (Film Desk Books). Previous books include Savage Art, a biography of Jim Thompson, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the poetry collections Hollywood & God and Doubles. He edited Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, for the Library of America, and in collaboration with filmmaker Michael Almereyda and novelist Jonathan Lethem edited Manny Farber: Paintings and Writings. He is also the author of A Reader’s Guide to James Merrill’s The Changing Light at Sandover, and a study of Byron's poetry. His poems and reviews, criticism, and essays on literature, film, and popular music have appeared in numerous magazines and journals, including The New Yorker, Harpers, The Believer, Bookforum, The Poetry Foundation website, Best American Essays, Best American Poetry, and Best American Film Writing. For nearly a decade, he judged the Graywolf Nonfiction Prize, choosing some celebrated and now-canonical books by Leslie Jamison, Eula Biss, Ander Monson, Kevin Young, Terese Svoboda, Margaret Lazarus Dean, and Kate Braverman. The founding director of the New School Graduate Writing Program and of the Riggio Honors Program: Writing & Democracy, he served as President of the Poetry Foundation (2013-2015). He recently co-curated with Michael Chaiken essays for Mixing Up the Medicine (Callaway), the catalog of the Bob Dylan Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Current projects include Detours, a book on noir in film and literature, and a new collection of poems.
