Greil Marcus Books

Elvis Presley remains alive--in the cultural imagination of our place and time. His vitality has intensified in direct proportion to the obsession with his memory. Dead Elvis chronicles this obsession; it is a biography of Elvis's life since his death. Elvis has become a sort of ever-present ghost behind any given cultural event, adding an element of mystery, drama, squalor, grandeur--an anarchy of possibilities--to manifestations as diverse as the Statue of Liberty centennial and the third ignored single by an unknown punk band. Greil Marcus follows the trail of this new, posthumous Elvis as an imaginative force, a kind of necessity--"the necessity existing in every culture that leads it to produce a perfect, all-inclusive metaphor for itself." Dead Elvis makes plain how the meanings of that metaphor have multiplied since Elvis died; how themes of freedom, responsibility, authority, sex, repression, youth, age, tradition, novelty, guilt, and redemption have been expressed through a phenomenon of such magnitude it can only be seen in fragments. "This is a book about what Elvis Presley has been up to in the last fourteen years," Marcus writes; "a small history of something much too big for one body or one face. Elvis Presley made history; this is a book about how, when he died, many people found themselves caught up in the adventure of remaking his history, which is to say their own."

America is a nation making itself up as it goes along--a story of discovery and invention unfolding in speeches and images, letters and poetry, unprecedented feats of scholarship and imagination. In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history. In more than two hundred original essays, this book brings together the nation's many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what "Made in America" means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric--cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape--From publisher description

This book offers a heartfelt exploration of the complexities involved in writing about art, blending personal anecdotes with critical insights. The author, a celebrated critic, shares their journey through the artistic landscape, examining the challenges and joys of articulating the experience of art. With a focus on the interplay between creativity and criticism, it invites readers to consider the deeper connections between the two, making it a compelling read for anyone interested in the art world.

A cult classic in a new edition.This book is about a single, serpentine fact: late in 1976 a record called 'Anarchy in the UK' was issued in London, and this event launched a transformation of pop music all over the world. The song distilled, in crudely poetic form, a critique of modern society once set out by a small group of Paris intellectuals.In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus's classic book on punk, Dadaism, the situationists, medieval heretics and the Knights of the Round Table (amongst others), the greatest cultural critic of our times unravels the secret history of the twentieth century.

A funny, fierce, and uninhibited musical chronicle of the convulsive past six years, from one of our finest cultural critics

"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 is a movie in which the director and actors, including Laurence Harvey, Frank Sinatra and Angela Lansbury in an Academy Award-nominated performance, were suddenly capable of anything, beyond any expectations. This edition includes a new foreword highlighting the movie's terrifying contemporary relevance in the age of Trump and Russian interference in the US Presidential election.

When it was first published, critic after critic called this brilliant study of rock 'n' roll and American culture the best book on the subject. Now, firmly established as a classic, the fourth edition features a completely new introduction as well as an entirely updated discography that includes CDs for the first time.

With the insight and style that have made him the foremost writer on American music, Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time and uncovers the histories embedded in the most fleeting cultural moments.

"Focusing on Bill Clinton, Elvis Presley, Hilary Clinton, Nirvana, Sinead O'Connor, Andy Warhol, and especially Bob Dylan, Marcus pursues the question of how culture is made and how, through culture, people remake themselves."--Jacket.

Sardonic, bitter, threatening, compassionate, gleeful, and most of all loud, 'Like a Rolling Stone' is much more than a song. Six minutes and six seconds in length, it was released by Dylan despite the received wisdom of the day as to what constituted a single. Originally published on the 40th anniversary of its release and recording, Greil Marcus' extraordinary book reconstructs the context in which the song first appeared, in terms of Dylan's own career (his controversial transformation from folk singer into rock n roll singer) and the world at large (Vietnam, the Watts Riots, the burgeoning counter-culture of the time). This is itself the stage for Marcus' recreation of the song on the page its emergence from fragments, its words, its sound, its discovery of itself. An analysis and critique of an artist at the height of his creative powers, it affords a unique insight into the mistakes, inspirations and bloody mindedness that come together only in the very highest cultural moments.