Events & Calendars "'The Daemon Lover,' Bob Dylan and the New Critics: Vernacular Music and the High Literary"

The book The Ink in the Grooves provides a backstage pass to the creative processes behind some of the most exciting and influential albums and novels of our time. Drop the record needle on any vinyl album in your collection, then read the first pages of that novel you’ve been meaning to pick up-- the reverberations between them will be impossible to miss. Since Dylan went electric, listening to rock ’n’ roll is frequently a surprisingly literary experience, while contemporary literature is curiously attuned to the history and beat of popular music. In The Ink in the Grooves, Florence Dore brings together a remarkable array of acclaimed novelists, musicians and music writers-- Bob Dylan, Michael Chabon, Colson Whitehead and Lucinda Williams, to name a few --to explore the provocative and mutually creative relationship between musical and literary inspiration, the vitality that writers draw from a three-minute blast of guitars and the poetic insights that musicians find in Shakespeare and science fiction.

Professor by day and rock star by night, Florence Dore is a singer-songwriter and Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She just released her second album, Highways and Rocketships (Propeller Sound Recordings), produced by Don Dixon and Mitch Easter, and published The Ink in the Grooves: Conversations on Literature and Rock 'n' Roll (Cornell University Press). She is also the co-executive producer for the Billboard-charting compilation album Cover Charge. She is currently on tour promoting the new record and book, joined by the dB’s rhythm section, Gene Holder and Will Rigby, and Mark Spencer of Son Volt.