At the start of December, out of the blue, author Elijah Wald received an early Christmas present from Bob Dylan. In a message posted to social media, the legendarily elusive singer-songwriter praised the casting of Timothée Chalamet as his younger self in the upcoming biopic A Complete Unknown and then took a moment to salute Wald’s book Dylan Goes Electric!, which helped inspire the new film. “It’s a fantastic retelling of events from the early Sixties that led up to the fiasco at Newport,” wrote Dylan. “After you’ve seen the movie read the book.”

When I catch up with him at his home in Philadelphia, Wald sounds as if he’s barely recovered from the shock. “It was astonishing,” he says. “Completely unexpected. Historically, he simply hasn’t done that. I had asked his manager at some point whether he had seen the book, and the response was: Bob doesn’t read Dylan books. So this was a very pleasant surprise.”

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