The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train "ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll" ( Publishers Weekly, starred review).Unlike previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock 'n' roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, in...

An "astute, challenging, and far-reaching" look (Kirkus Reviews, starred) at how F. Scott Fitzgerald's vision of the American Dream has been understood, portrayed, distorted, misused, and kept alive"Now more than ever, we need to think long and hard about our collective national fantasies. There's no one better suited to this task than Greil Marcus."—David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded KneeRenowned critic Greil Marcus takes on the fascinating legacy of F. Scott F...

From the critic who knows music and culture like no other, a fascinating look at two outsiders who epitomize America's fractured self-imageIn June of 1992, when all polls showed Bill Clinton didn't have a chance, he took his saxophone onto the Arsenio Hall Show, put on dark glasses, and blew "Heartbreak Hotel." Greil Marcus, one of America's most imaginative and insightful critics, was the first to name this as the moment that turned Clinton's campaign around--and to make s...

Acclaimed cultural critic Greil Marcus tells the story of Bob Dylan through the lens of seven penetrating songs"Marcus delivers yet another essential work of music journalism."—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Further elevates Marcus to what he has always been: a supreme artist-critic."—Hilton Als"Greil Marcus is already the most important chronicler of Dylan. But here he outdoes himself."—Rachel KushnerAcross seven decades, Bob Dylan has been the first singe...

It was the twang heard 'round the world: Rockabilly was born out of country, bluegrass, jazz, and the blues in the 1950s, becoming rock 'n' roll and ruling the world. Here's the story of Elvis Presley's first Sun records that inspired all. And here's Carl Perkins, Gene Vincent, Eddie Cochran, Jerry Lee Lewis, Johnny Cash, Roy Orbison, and many more rockabillies from the golden years of 1955–1959, in a book chock full of photos, collectible memorabilia, movie posters, rare records, fashion,...

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," film critic Pauline Kael wrote of John Frankenheimer's terrifying 1962 political thriller about an American serviceman brainwashed in Korea and made into an assassin. Sophisticated to be sure, it's also a headlong fall through the looking-glass of American politics and the most deeply prophetic film of the second half of the American century. As Greil Marcus reconstructs the drama, The Manchurian Candidate

Greil Marcus, author of Mystery Train, widely acclaimed as the best book ever written about America as seen through its music, began work on this new book out of a fascination with the Sex Pistols: that scandalous antimusical group, invented in London in 1975 and dead within two years, which sparked the emergence of the culture called punk. “I am an antichrist!” shouted singer Johnny Rotten—where in the world of pop music did that come from? Looking for an answer, with a high sens...

Until his death aged thirty-three in 1982, Lester Bangs wrote wired, rock 'n' roll pieces on Iggy Pop, The Clash, John Lennon, Kraftwerk, Lou Reed. As a rock critic, he had an eagle-eye for distinguishing the pre-packaged imitation from the real thing; written in a conversational, wisecracking, erotically charged style, his hallucinatory hagiographies and excoriating take-downs reveal an iconoclast unafraid to tell it like it is. To his journalism he brought the talent of a great a renegad...

From the author of Mystery Train and Lipstick Traces, an exhilarating and provocative investigation of the tangle of American identity"America is a place and a story, made up of exuberance and suspicion, crime and liberation, lynch mobs and escapes; its greatest testaments are made of portents and warnings, biblical allusions that lose all certainty in the American air." It is this story of self-invention and nationhood that Greil Marcus rediscovers, begin...

"No previous writer has so transportingly or authoritatively revealed Mr. Dylan against receding vistas of American music and culture." —Robert Polito, The New York Times Book ReviewGreil Marcus's widely acclaimed book is about the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967 a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it w...

For over two centuries, America has celebrated the same African-American culture it attempts to control and repress, and nowhere is this phenomenon more apparent than in the strange practice of blackface performance. Born of extreme racial and class conflicts, the blackface minstrel show appropriated black dialect, music, and dance; at once applauded and lampooned black culture; and, ironically, contributed to a "blackening of America." Drawing on recent research in cultural studies and so...

A Beat-era novel of heroin addiction in 1950s New York City that was called "a treasure" by Ken Kesey.This is the journal of Joe Necchi, a junkie living on a barge that plies the rivers and bays of New York. Joe's world is the half-world of drugs and addicts—the world of furtive fixes in sordid Harlem apartments, of police pursuits down deserted subway stations. Junk for Necchi, however, is a tool, freely chosen and fully justified; he is Cain, the malcontent, the ...