Greil Marcus's books include Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, and The History of Rock ’n’ Roll in Ten Songs. He teaches at Berkeley and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York.
“Marcus is as likely to train his discerning gaze on a subway
busker using a spare-change-filled coffee cup to create a
Motown-worthy groove as he is to wax poetic on Adele or Lady
Gaga.”—Christian Science Monitor
*The Christian Science Monitor*
“This new book (of old snippets) is superb.”—Dwight Garner, of the
New York Times (via Twitter)
*Dwight Garner*
“Real Life Rock redeems the list format from the current
proliferation of "listicles"—and paces it as a thing cultural
consumers have always employed for sanity, a way to force some
order into an insatiable and unwieldy habit. . . . It’s a good time
for this book: Real Life Rock reminds skeptics that capsule reviews
have a long and rich tradition.”—Sam Lefebvre, Pitchfork
*Pitchfork*
“Even Marcus fans who have never read a single one of these columns
will recognize some of the writer’s favorite topics from Dada to
Dylan to punk to Randy Newman to the legend of Stagger Lee, all of
which make multiple appearances through the book’s 500-plus pages.
If that page count seems daunting, fear not. There isn’t an entry
you’ll want to skip.”—Adam Ellsworth, The Arts Fuse
*The Arts Fuse*
“Stunning; even in the capsule format, the energy and
breathlessness of Marcus’ prose is electrifying. . . a history of
three-plus decades of American popular culture, told not in the
familiar touchstones, but in bootlegs, B-sides, sidebars, and
secrets.”—Jason Baily, Flavorwire
*Flavorwire*
“Even if you aren’t running to your computer to stream some of
these tracks and albums he wrote about over the years, you’ll still
be stopping in your tracks to admire the economy of Marcus’s
writing for this column. In as short as about 100 – 150 words, he
can take you deep within the heart of a particular album or live
performance, or dismiss something cheekily out of hand with a small
wave.”—Robert Ham, SpectrumCulture.com
*SpectrumCulture.com*
“Real Life Rock sprawls and rejoices and bitches and moans
depending on what’s happening in the world. And yet each book
examines the commonplace as a subject and a way of being, as a
language anyone might use and a way of listening that’s true to
ordinary life and all its plainness, order, customs, and moments of
the unexpected.”—Robert Loss, The Los Angeles Review of Books
*The Los Angeles Review of Books*
“Mr. Marcus’s magpie columns collect stray opinions: on songs,
movies, books, politics, moments. They make up a kind of
underground cultural history of the past three decades, and the
items in each column are by turns beautiful, strange, funny and
vicious. This feels like both Mr. Marcus’s official bootleg and a
reference book of a very high caliber.”—Dwight Garner, The New York
Times, Holiday Gift Guide 2015 section
*The New York Times*
“A real treasure.”—Jonathan Russell Clark, LiteraryHub.com, “The
Year in Collected Essays”
*LiteraryHub.com*
“A truly amazing body of work, with Marcus delivering insightful
thoughts on a wide range of topics, including books, movies, art
shows, concerts, spam emails, and, more than anything else, music.
This is essential reading for anyone interested in critical
writing”—Matthew Perpetua, BuzzFeed, “21 Great Books About Music
for 2015”
*BuzzFeed*
“Real Life Rock collects 29 years of Greil Marcus' unique real life
rock columns, each of which stuffs opinions about books, movies and
politics into entries about music and vice versa. If you doubt that
monthly columns assembled in bits and pieces can hold up over time,
I direct you to page 141 and his remarks on a 1995 FRONTLINE
documentary about Hillary Clinton. Marcus' words read like
tomorrow's news and they definitely rock.”—Ken Tucker, NPR’s “Fresh
Air”
*NPR’s “Fresh Air”*
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