Dylan at Play offers a selection of writings that can challenge and engross readers eager for new ways to meet the singularity of Bob Dylan’s work. We have no interest in competing with the almost numberless and ever-increasing quantity of critical and encyclopedic writing on Dylan. Our goal with this collection has been play and not categorizing or defining. We solicited material that might, in sum, create a vision of both reverent scrutiny and mischief. In this collection, you’ll find writers who generally are not already fixtures in the Dylan Criticism industry. Here you’ll meet a webmaster, theologians, a linguist, a poet, a polyglot, scholars and teachers. The writers in this collection have heard Dylan’s art calling to them through their particular frameworks of meaning and expression, and the pieces here are a result of their abilities to find the voices to respond to that call. We hope above all that readers of Dylan at Play will become inspired to invent and play with their own experiences of this artist.

Beginning with rockabilly, moving on to folk music, sliding over to electric, and falling into a psychedelic phase, like a chameleon Bob Dylan has changed his skin repeatedly over the years, juggling his image with apparent ease and subverting the prevailing social and aesthetic models each time. His Supro guitar and the leather jacket - reminiscent of James Dean; the muse of his hobo period Suze Rotolo and his legendary Triumph Bonneville; the Newport Jazz Festival and the Gaslight Cafe in Greenwich Village: artist Matteo Guarnaccia has documented this pilgrimage of styles stage by stage, year by year, with a wealth of detail. The clothes, faces, music and places of those years become subjects to colour in, paper-dolls to dress, and board games to assemble, while the characters of his songs provide the members of a colorful circus. This is the ultimate collector's activity-book to be approached with glue, scissors and coloring pencils, dedicated to all the fans of the legendary singer-songwriter.

From the world's leading authority on Bob Dylan comes the definitive biography that promises to transform our understanding of the man and musician—thanks to early access to Dylan's never-before-studied archives. In 2016 Bob Dylan sold his personal archive to the George Kaiser Foundation in Tulsa, Oklahoma, reportedly for $22 million. As the boxes started to arrive, the Foundation asked Clinton Heylin—author of the acclaimed Bob Dylan: Behind the Shades and 'perhaps the world's authority on all things Dylan' (Rolling Stone)—to assess the material they had been given. What he found in Tulsa—as well as what he gleaned from other papers he had recently been given access to by Sony and the Dylan office—so changed his understanding of the artist, especially of his creative process, that he became convinced that a whole new biography was needed. It turns out that much of what previous biographers—Dylan himself included—have said is wrong. With fresh and revealing information on every page A Restless, Hungry Feeling tells the story of Dylan's meteoric rise to fame: his arrival in early 1961 in New York, where he is embraced by the folk scene; his elevation to spokesman of a generation whose protest songs provide the soundtrack for the burgeoning Civil Rights movement; his alleged betrayal when he 'goes electric' at Newport in 1965; his subsequent controversial world tour with a rock 'n' roll band; and the recording of his three undisputed electric masterpieces: Bringing it All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. At the peak of his fame in July 1966 he reportedly crashes his motorbike in Woodstock, upstate New York, and disappears from public view. When he re-emerges, he looks different, his voice sounds different, his songs are different. Clinton Heylin's meticulously researched, all-encompassing and consistently revelatory account of these fascinating early years is the closest we will ever get to a definitive life of an artist who has been the lodestar of popular culture for six decades.

For fifty years, the music, words, story, and fans of Bob Dylan have fascinated David Gaines. As a son, a husband, a father, a teacher, and a passionate lover of the literary in all its guises, he has pursued the poetic fusion of knowledge and emotion all his life. More often than not, Dylan’s lyrics and music have expressed that fusion for him, and so he has encouraged others to acknowledge the musician or writer or painter or director or actor or athlete who matters deeply (perhaps a bit mysteriously) to them, and to deploy that enigmatic passion in service of self-knowledge and social connection. After all, one of the central reasons to be a fan is to compare notes, explore mysteries, and riff with fellow fans in a community of exploration. Gaines’s personal journey toward creating such communities of passionate knowledge encompasses his own coming of age and marriages, fatherhood, and teaching. As a devoted fan who is also a professor of American literature, questions about teaching and learning are central to his experience. When asked, “Why Dylan?” he says, “He’s the writer I care about the most. He’s been the way into the best and longest running conversations I have ever had.” Talking with students, exchanging Dylan trivia with fellow fans, or cheering on fan-musicians doing Dylan covers during the Dylan Days festival, Gaines shows that, for many people, being a fan of popular culture couples serious critical and creative engagement with heartfelt commitment. Here, largely unheralded, the ideal of liberal education is realized every day.

When State Department attorney Vivian Steele witnesses two ambassadors collapse as if poisoned at a diplomatic dinner in Washington, DC, she is recruited to be a member of a joint FBI task force assigned to investigate. But she soon finds her by-the-book ways clashing with a special agent in the Diplomatic Security Service, Jacob Cruz. A former Navy SEAL and in charge of the event's security, Jacob takes the attack personally and is driven to act quickly, even ahead of the rules and regulations. As Viv starts to work her diplomatic sources, her past as a State Department lawyer comes back to haunt her, and secrets held tightly by the government thrust her into a web of danger. Afraid, Viv turns to the one man bent on protecting others. But can she accept Jacob's reckless ways as exactly what she needs to stay alive and to discover the truth behind the attacks?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • USA TODAY BESTSELLER TODAY Show co-host and meteorologist Dylan Dreyer launches a new picture book series featuring Misty—a little cloud with big feelings! The author combines her extensive weather knowledge with her experience as a mom in this very special social-emotional learning franchise. When Misty the Cloud wakes up feeling stormy, nothing seems to make her day better! And Misty’s grumbly mood affects everyone when her big emotions cause a thunderstorm to rumble across the sky. But with help from friends and family, Misty accepts that sometimes she’s just going to be a little stormy—and it will always pass. Read the first book in a sky-high series about how to deal with good days, bad days, and everything in between!