"Listening to Van Morrison" represents Greil Marcus' quest to trace Morrison's particular genius through seminal moments in his long career, beginning in 1965, breaking open in 1968 with the incomparable "Astral Weeks", and continuing in full force to this day. This is a portrait of a perplexing, my[...]

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 [...]

Unlike all previous versions of rock 'n' roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points that everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs recorded between 1956 and 2008, then proceeds to dramatize how each [...]

Praised by Robbie Robertson of The Band as "a classic & a ticket to ride," "The Rose & the Briar" assembles an astonishing group of writers and artists: Paul Muldoon, Stanley Crouch, R. Crumb, Jon Langford of the Mekons, Sharyn McCrumb, Luc Sante, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Marsh, and more than a dozen[...]

Greil Marcus's study of American rock and roll is universally acclaimed as the benchmark work of modern rock criticism. Using a handful of artists - a brace of bluesmen, The Band, Sly Stone, Randy Newman and Elvis Presley - Marcus illuminates and interprets the American Dream in rigorous prose touch[...]

Greil Marcus weaves individual moods and moments into a brilliant history of their changing times. This book begins in Berkeley in 1968, and ends with a piece on Dylan's show at the University of Minnesota on election night 2008. In between are moments of euphoric discovery: from Marcus' sleeve note[...]

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 spark[...]

"It may be the most sophisticated political thriller ever made in Hollywood," Pauline Kael wrote of this film, 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 thro[...]

This book is a quest to understand Van Morrisons particular genius through a close look at the most extraordinary and unclassifiable moments in his long career, beginning in 1965 and continuing in full force to this day: sometimes entire songs, sometimes single words or even the guttural spaces betw[...]

Gilbert Seldes's own introduction to "The Stammering Century" nicely illustrates the range of interest and verve of expression that make it such a fascinating and enduring work of history. Seldes writes:
"This book is not a record of the major events in American history during the nineteenth cen[...]

A fan from the moment the Doors' first album took over KMPX, the revolutionary FM rock & roll station in San Francisco, Greil Marcus saw the band many times at the legendary Fillmore Auditorium and the Avalon Ballroom in 1967. Five years later it was all over. Forty years after the singer Jim Morris[...]

This is a fascinating collection of interviews with one of America's most influential authors, music journalists, and cultural critics. For more than four decades, Greil Marcus has explored the connections among figures, sounds, and events in culture, relating unrelated points of departure, mapping [...]

In 1978, Greil Marcus asked twenty writers on rock-including Dave Marsh, Lester Bangs, Nick Tosches, Ellen Willis, and Robert Christgau-a question: What one rock-and-roll album would you take to a desert island? The resulting essays were collected in Stranded, twenty passionate declarations to such [...]