Tarantula

By Bob Dylan and Dennis Boutsikaris

Narrated by Will Patton

WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

Music legend Bob Dylan's only work of fiction—a combination of stream of consciousness prose, lyrics, and poetry that gives fans insight into one of the most influential singer-songwriters of our time.

Written in 1966, Tarantula is a collection of poems and prose that evokes the turbulence of the times in which it was written, and gives a unique insight into Dylan's creative evolution. It captures Bob Dylan's preoccupations at a crucial juncture in his artistic development, showcasing the imagination of a folk poet laureate who was able to combine the humanity and compassion of his country roots with the playful surrealism of modern art. Angry, funny, and strange, the poems and prose in this collection reflect the concerns found in Dylan's most seminal music: a sense of protest, a verbal playfulness and spontaneity, and a belief in the artistic legitimacy of chronicling everyday life and eccentricity on the street.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Dec 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9781508229018

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, author and painter, who has been an influential figure in popular music and culture for more than five decades. Since bursting into the public’s consciousness in the early 1960s, Dylan has sold more than 125 million records, won eleven Grammy Awards and has six entries in the Grammy Hall of Fame. His contribution to worldwide culture has been recognised with many awards, including the 2016 Nobel Prize for Literature (the first songwriter to receive such a distinction); America’s highest civilian honour, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, from President Obama in 2012; a Special Citation Pulitzer Prize in 2008; an Academy Award in 2001 for ‘Things Have Changed’ from the film Wonder Boys. He released his thirty-ninth studio album, Triplicate, in April 2017, and continues to tour worldwide.

Reviews for Tarantula

[Adrienne Hitt · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

Y’all did Bob dirty letting this man read his book like that.

[Ron Brewington · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

WOW! Dylan apparently played a joke. There's a lot of funny lines but if there is an actual story I failed to comprehend it.

The narrator was nearly impossible to understand at first but he got much better after he sardines on St Patrick's Day.

[edwinbcn · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

The winning of the Nobel Prize by Bob Dylan must be the reason why the Guilin-based Guangxi Normal University Press decided to publish Dylan's only prose novel called Tarantula (1966). This edition is a bi-lingual Chinese-English (on opposing pages) heavily annotated hardback edition. For study purposes, line numering is added.

It is a beautiful edition for a horrible work! I found this utterly unreadable. Basically, it is free association, stream-of-consciousness prose, although the inclusion of very unusual references suggests post-editing and enrichment of the text. Many punctuation conventions have been abandoned, and there is frequent usage of ampersand.

It is mindboggling how anyone can produce such B.S. particularly consistently is such a large quantity (roughly 150 pages). (The total number of pages in this edition is 529.). I wonder whether the author used substances.

Kerouac's stream-of-consciousness prose can be challenging at times, but at least it seems artful, and one can detect beauty and meaning. Tarantula merely gave me a great sense of irritation. Phew!

[johnphelan-2 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Dylan is the greatest musical artist of the 20th century and the best of his lyrics are some of the great poems of the period but this 'novel' is poor. Essentially an extended version of the sleevenotes for his fourth, fifth, and sixth albums, the long form leads to a lack of focus which ensures that nothing memorable emerges. There are quotes from the sleeve of Bringing It all Back Home which I can recall twenty years after first reading them, I just finished this and can't remember anything. Dylan can write prose as Chronicles shows, but for a slimmed down a far superior version of what's in Tarantula, check out his wonderful poem Last Thoughts on Woody Guthrie.

[jannemangan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

DYLAN'S BOOK

The year 1965-66 was one of the most intensely creative periods of Bob Dylan's career. This was when he produced such crucial songs as Mr. Tambourine Man, Like a Roiling Stone, Desolation Row, She Belongs to Me, Love Minus Zero/No Limit, and Ballad of a Thin Man. It was also the time in which he wrote TARANTULA, his first and (so far) only book.

'Surrealism on speed', 'a fantastical journey through our life and times', 'a beautiful, flowing, stormy prose poem', 'a carnival of vitality and vision' - TARANTU LA has been called all these. But ultimately no description can hope to convey its unique imaginative quality. It is Dylan's book. It needs no other recommendation.

Cover photograph by Jerry Schatzberg