Allen & Unwin Mystery Train book Music English Paperback 448 pages

More than 20 years after its initial publication, Mystery Train remains one of the smartest, most provocative books ever written about rock-and-roll.

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 touching on the myth, landscape and oral tradition of the continent. This comprehensive, revised edition of a milestone achievement in the effort to establish rock and roll as a fit subject for serious cultural criticism, includes a new preface by the author.

Greil Marcus was born in San Francisco in 1945. He is the author of Mystery Train, Invisible Republic, Lipstick Traces, Double Trouble and Bob Dylan: Writings 1968-2010 and the editor of Lester Bangs's Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung. In 1998 he curated the exhibition '1948' at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. He writes the Real Life Rock Top 10 column for The Believer and teaches at the New School in New York. He was described by John Rockwell in the New York Times as 'a writer of rare perception and a genuinely innovative thinker'. Greil Marcus lives in California.