The Bob Dylan Book Club Book-of-the-Month for June 2026 is Bob Dylan In Performance: Song, Stage, and Screen by Keith Nainby and John Radosta (2019). Our authors will attend the discussion!
In Dylan’s song My Own Version of You from his 2020 album Rough and Rowdy Ways, he sings about assembling a patchwork creature (let’s call that a metaphor for writing a song based on the patchwork of his multitudes), but more than that, about the need to bring that creature to life. He has to get the creature to breathe, the very breath that the singer breathes to bring his song to life. In Dylan’s Nobel Lecture he stresses that his lyrics are part of a song and that the song is subject to performance.
Coming at the importance of the stage to Bob Dylan in another way: I posit that part of what makes Dylan unique and compelling is what we might call his Attitude, his Stance, his Persona. He is an Actor. He wears multiple masks and takes on multiple roles.
Nainby and Radosta is book is squarely focused on this aspect of how Dylan keeps up his end of his bargain with the Chief Commander…”on this earth and the one we can’t see”.

Links to interviews with our authors:
Here's an interview with Keith and John at The Arts Fuse: 
https://artsfuse.org/296221/author-interview-in-praise-of-an-american-bard-bob-dylan-in-performance-song-stage-and-screen/
John Radosta’s appearance on Infinity Goes Up On Trial with our own Erin Callahan:  
https://thefm.club/podcast/john-radosta-iot-08/
John Radosta’s appearance on Dylantantes with Dr. Jim Salvucci: 
https://thedylantantes.substack.com/p/interview-with-john-radosta
Keith Nainby’s Dylantantes interview with John Salvucci: 
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLD_G2IarMgqZ1BAz9_4-C7LIyQvSeJQFZ

John Radosta Keith Nainby

Keith Nainby is a communication professor at Cal State Stanislaus. His journeys in higher education and in making sense of Bob Dylan have been intertwined almost from the start:  While just a third of the way though his first undergraduate year at Boston University, he moved unceremoniously into a suite already including a sophomore named John Radosta. John took stock of Keith with the level of witty and cautious skepticism befitting both a sophomore regarding a freshman and a Dylan lover regarding any new interloper and determining, “Can I relate to that?” To Keith’s great joy, the answer seemed to be “yes”—enough so that John introduced Keith to both Dylan’s work through shared listening and to the invigorating teaching of Sir Christopher Ricks there at BU . Some 37 years (!!!) hence, Keith continues to grapple with Dylan’s unwieldy and astonishing canon together with John. So far, this effort has resulted in their co-authorship of one book and three book chapters on Dylan’s art. Keith has published additional solo essays on Dylan as well as a book and several other essays on Taylor Swift. 
John Radosta teaches English and creative writing at Milton High School, just outside of Boston, Massachusetts. A novelist and author of many short stories, he is also a veteran of more than 50 Bob Dylan concerts. He presented on Dylan and Omar Khayyám at the 2023 World of Bob Dylan Conference in Tulsa, and then on Woody Guthrie's unreleased recordings of Omar Khayyám at the ARSC conference, also in Tulsa. He is the co-author with Keith Nainby of the book Bob Dylan in Performance: Song, Stage and Screen, as well as several book chapters, and solo articles in The Dylan Review and The ARSC Journal.