A CHRONICLE OF A CULTURAL OBSESSION As he listens in on the public conversation that recreates Elvis after death, Marcus tracks the path of Presley's resurrection. He grafts together scattered fragments of the eclectic dialogue--snatches of movies and music, books and newspapers, photographs, posters, cartoons--and amazes us with not only what America has been saying as it raises its late king, but also what this strange obsession with a dead Elvis can tell us about America itself. With the startling insights and electric style that have made him our foremost writer on American music, Greil Marcus brings back to life the cultural events that have defined us and our time. Again and again he skewers the widespread assumption that history exists only in the past, that it is behind us, relegated to the dustbin. GOING HOME WITH ELVIS "[Marling] knows her way around the Nashville country-music scene, the celebrity mansions of Bel Air, the hipster clothing outlets of Memphis. She evokes role models of conspicuous consumption like Hank Williams and Liberace, who--like Presley--knew they were thumbing their noses at good taste, but did so with more humor...Graceland is filled with the rich madness of life...[It] is as pleasing as a new pair of blue suede shoes." --Robert Campbell, New York Times Book Review A SECRET HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY "Lipstick Traces is no sedate academic record of libertarian revolt but a bold blending of anecdote, personal confession and cultural analysis, cutting backward and forward from Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols to the Surrealists, from Alexander Trocchi of the 1950's avant-garde group know as Lettrist International to George Grosz, from the Anabaptists in the 16th century to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, Danny the Red of the French student rebellion...[Marcus's] book is impressively adept at bringing alive some of the dramatic moments of the history it charts...A coruscatingly original piece of work, vibrant with the energy of the bizarre happenings it maps out." --Terry Eagleton, New York Times Book Review ESSAY ON THE BROADWAY MUSICAL "Place for Us takes the protective colorations of the Broadway musical--its happy-as-the-day-is-long heterosexuality, its promise that wouldn't-it-be-lovely? cravings for happiness will always be satisfied--and strips them away to reveal the gay world that lies beneath, rife with fascinating sublimations and subtexts. The shape of D.A. Miller's argument and the passions that impel it are in perfect accord, which is just what we ask of the best kinds of musical numbers. This book is like a musical score that the genre has yet to catch up with." --Margo Jefferson, New York Times BLACKFACE PERFORMANCE FROM JIM CROW TO HIP HOP The story of a rebellious, truly popular culture stretching from Jim Crow to hip hop is told for the first time in Raising Cain, a provocative look at how the outcasts of official culture have made their own place in the world. Unearthing a wealth of long-buried plays and songs and overturning cherished ideas about classics, W. T. Lhamon Jr. offers a startlingly original history of blackface as a cultural ritual that, for all its racist elements, was ultimately liberating.