Boy from the North Country: Sam Sussman’s Overly Cautious Autofiction By Paul Haney If you write a novel, readers will want to know which parts of your story are true; a memoir, which parts are made up. Sam Sussman’s Boy from the North Country—an “auto-fictional novel,” according to its publisher, Penguin finds itself with […]
Apollo and the Sad-Eyed Lady: Nietzsche Listening to Dylan By Stephen Rive We do not always keep our eyes . . . from finishing off the poem; and then it is no longer eternal imperfection that we carry across the river of becoming—we then feel that we are carrying a goddess, and are proud and […]
Too ‘Tangled Up in Blues’: A Look Inside Bob Dylan’s 1974 Notebooks By W. Jason Miller, North Carolina State University Over twenty pages of Dylan’s handwritten lyrics to “Tangled Up in Blue” (1974) are now available for study at the Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma.[1] These lyrics are located in two small 5 […]
“The Lost Rolling Thunder Show” By Bill Lattanzi Trapped forever in grains of silver, thirty four year-old Bob Dylan is blasting through “Isis,” his clear blue eyes fixed on a far-off vision of the song’s “outrageous” snow, harmonica wrapped in an arm-pumping fist. Totem, talisman, sole surviving evidence, I’ve kept the photo with me […]
“Songs of Love Sing” By Thomas G. Palaima Songs of love sing fire, ice and stone forever together nevermore alone hearts call out to hearts gently, true and sweet birds sing joyous songs in songs, when lovers meet arm and arm, hand and hand, dancing at the edge of sand, songs sing […]
Dylan once said, memorably, “all my songs are protest songs.” Common consensus is he was referring not to genre so much as to an attitude, not content so much as ethos. And, in fact, analyzing Dylan through the lens of attitude or ethos has gotten more screen time than genre studies. But what if he […]
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 […]
