Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today’s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Hollywood & God (Phoenix Poets)

Literature & Fiction

Polito, Robert

Poetry

University of Chicago Press

Doubles (Phoenix Poets)

Doubles is at once tough-minded and urbane, veering from lyricism to street slang, oscillating with the beat of the American city. As his title suggests, Polito's world is one of doubling, simulation, impersonation, and mimicry—a shrewd vision of urban life.

Doubles is at once tough-minded and urbane, veering from lyricism to street slang, oscillating with the beat of the American city. As his title suggests, Polito's world is one of doubling, simulation, impersonation, and mimicry—a shrewd vision of urban life.

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

KNOPF

An invaluable road map for the epic poem of our time

A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

History & Criticism

University of Michigan Press

A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's the Changing Light at Sandover

Univ of Michigan Pr

Robert Polito recounts Thompson's relationship with his father, a disgraced Oklahoma sheriff, with the women he adored in life and murdered on the page, with alcohol, would-be censors, and Hollywood auteurs. Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER)

Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

A prevailing narrative goes: Bob Dylan, the voice of Sixties counterculture, disappeared in the 1970s in a haze of substance abuse, made arguably the worst music of his career, and was finally put to bed 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 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.

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

Liveright

This title, first published in 1987, comprises of three essays which examine Lord Byron’s poetry. Some of Byron’s most famous poems are examined, including Don Juan and Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. This title will be of interest to students of literature.

At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry (Routledge Library Editions: Lord Byron)

British & Irish

Routledge

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Polito, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Polito, Robert

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Polito, Robert. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Hollywood & God (Phoenix Poets)

Doubles (Phoenix Poets)

Doubles (Phoenix Poets)

Hollywood & God (Phoenix Poets)

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson

A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover

A Reader's Guide to James Merrill's the Changing Light at Sandover

Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER)

After the Flood: Inside Bob Dylan's Memory Palace

At the Titan's Breakfast: Three Essays on Byron's Poetry (Routledge Library Editions: Lord Byron)