Ron Rosenbaum. Bob Dylan: Things Have Changed. New York: Melville House, 2025, v + 271 pp. Review by D. Quentin Miller, Suffolk University Change. The final word in this book’s title indicates the perfect framework for approaching Dylan midway through the sixth decade of his prominence. We could follow his early lead and say […]
Mike Chasar (ed). The Poetry of Bob Dylan: Thirty Essays on Thirty Songs. Bloomsbury Academic, 2025, 240 pp. Review by Charles O. Hartman, Connecticut College In the Introduction to The Poetry of Bob Dylan, editor Mike Chasar lays out a mission. Though there is a large and ever-growing body of critical and scholarly work […]
Robert Reginio. Bob Dylan Outside the Law: The Poetics of John Wesley Harding, Palgrave Macmillan, 2025, 281 pp. Review by Nicholas Birns, New York University Robert Reginio offers a reading of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding (1967) that is capacious, provocative, and helps us recognize the significant place of the album, or, as Reginio calls […]
Bob Dylan. 3Arena, Dublin, Ireland, 25 Nov. 2025. Review by Erin C. Callahan, San Jacinto College In the fall of 2021, Bob Dylan ended his Covid-19 pandemic touring hiatus and began the Rough and Rowdy Ways World Wide Tour with a setlist comprised of songs from his 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways. Early […]
Francesco Donadio, Freewheelin’ in Rome. La vera storia della prima volta di Bob Dylan in Italia. [“Freewheelin’ in Rome”: The true story of Dylan’s first time in Italy”]. Rome: Arcana, 2022, pp. 160. Review by Alessandro Carrera, University of Houston A few years ago, Francesco Donadio, a music journalist, radio programmer, and author of […]
Steven Rings. What Did You Hear? The Music of Bob Dylan. University of Chicago Press, 2025. 360 pp. Review by Jonathan Hodgers, Trinity College Dublin. Here we have an important book about Bob Dylan: one that puts analysis of the music first. Steven Rings has antecedents in terms of monographs (which he acknowledges in […]
Bob Dylan. The Bootleg Series Vol. 18: Through the Open Window 1956–1963. 8CD, Columbia Records and Legacy Recordings, 31 Oct. 2025. Review by Gayle Wald, The George Washington University Through the open window the voice of the beauty of the world came murmuring, too softly to hear exactly what it said—but what mattered if […]
Crash on the Levee (Down in the Flood). Copyright © 1967 by Dwarf Music; renewed 1995 by Dwarf Music. Lay Lady Lay. Copyright © 1969 by Big Sky Music; renewed 1997 by Big Sky Music. To Ramona. Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music. All songs written by […]
Todd Almond. Slow Train Coming: Bob Dylan’s Girl from the North Country and Broadway’s Rebirth. Bloomberg, 2025. David Browne. Talkin’ Greenwich Village: The Heady Rise and Slow Fall of America’s Bohemian Music Capital. Hachette Books, 2024.
Alessandro Carrera is Moores Professor of Italian Studies and World Cultures and Literatures at the University of Houston, Texas. He has translated the songs and prose of Bob Dylan into Italian, including Chronicles, Volume One and Tarantula, and authored La voce di Bob Dylan. Britt Eisnor is a writer and researcher. Britt graduated from Emerson College in 2019 […]
