When That Rough God Goes Riding: Listening to Van Morrison (PublicAffairs)
We're thrilled to announce that Greil Marcus, music and culture critic, Believer columnist, and author or editor of many Skylight staff and customer favorites (Lipstick Traces, A New Literary History of America, and others) will be here to discuss and sign his new book of criticism on another Skylight favorite person: Van Morrison.
Greil Marcus is the author of The Shape of Things to Come, Like a Rolling Stone, and The Old Weird America; a twentieth anniversary edition of his book Lipstick Traces was published in 2009. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America, published last year by Harvard University Press. Since 2000 he has taught at Princeton, Berkeley, Minnesota, and the New School in New York; his column “Real Life Rock Top 10” appears regularly in The Believer. He lives in Berkeley.
"In 1989, Harvard University Press published "Lipstick Traces," the second book by the American writer and critic Greil Marcus. It was a dazzling creation, mapping out an untold "secret history" which connected the Sex Pistols, the Dadaists, the Parisian evenements of 1968, that legendary subversive clique the Situationist International and an Anabaptist revolt in 16th-century Germany, led by a notorious libertine named John of Leyden. Among the book's most ardent fans, it sparked real epiphanies...It stands as a singularly idiosyncratic product of a genre-cum-tradition rooted in the business of writing about musicians and the whirl of ideas that once surrounded them...[Marcus] manages some of the finest music writing ever to make it on to the page...My 20-year-old copy of "Lipstick Traces" is the one book I would save from my proverbial burning house." -- John Harris "The Guardian" (06/27/2009)
In more than 200 original essays, "A New Literary History of America" brings together the nation's many voices from the first conception of a New World in the 16th century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop.