Invisible Republic

Press Reviews

• Bob Dylan

  This book is a terminal, goes deeply into the subconscious and plows through that period of time like a rake. Greil Marcus has done it again

• New York Times Book Review

  It is the speculative intelligence with which Marcus chases the spectres and wraiths of this country's musical past that emerges as the exhilarating feat of Invisible Republic . . . No previous writer has so transportingly or authoritatively revealed Mr Dylan against the receding vistas of American music and culture

• Newsday

  The years best work of criticism, hands down . . . Marcus draws bold freehand loops around Dylan's music, loops so wide and loose that they take in not just the breadth of American folk music, but huge chunks of American history as well. This is the best kind of history book, one that acknowledges that mythology is sometimes the truest kind of fact

• Salon

  Marcus has always been set on discovering how much a performer can bring to his or her material, and how much a critic can bring to bear on those performances . . . He offers his readers a breathtaking sense of freedom

• Rolling Stone

  Nearly everyone will be dazed at one point or another along the mystery trip that Marcus leads, because his desire is not to settle your notions but to vaporise them . . . Marcus knows where Dylan is at all times, in his absence as well as his presence. On the haunted back roads of the Invisible Republic, these two elusive old masters, tricksters both, have finally met their match

• Observer

  Will stand as one of the classics of American criticism

• New York

  [Marcus's] work is very likely the most imaginative criticism being done, but it's more than that: it's a light in dark times

• Time Out

  Dylan once famously described folk music as 'nothing but a mystery'. Here the mystery is thoroughly explored and gloriously deepened

• Rolling Stone

  The wisest, funniest book about rock since Marcus's own 1975 Mystery Train

• Arena

  A poetic encounter with the latent stories of America's manifest dreams. Non-fiction novel of the year

• Boston Phoenix

  In many ways, [Marcus's] most subtle book. Marcus's love of gnostic self-creation, of infinite possibility, is tempered here by a profound awareness of the power of tradition, of the way in which the new makes sense only because of, not despite, the old

• Guardian

  One heaven of a book . . . What Marcus brings to these songs is a variety of good things: fierce fervour, social convictions, a loving discrimination, never a touch of envy and an extraordinary ability to evoke in words the very feel (throaty, threatening, thorough, thick with thought) of a man's voice, of this man's voice

• New City

  Marcus finds in the Basement Tapes an unfinished synthesis of free speech and the shaggy-dog story, two obsessions of Marcus's writing and perhaps finally of American history

• Mary Gaitskill

  Artforum

  Marcus's writing works much like music: it flies by in a comet tail

• Entertainment Weekly

  Reads like a thriller

• The Wire

  Marcus's contention is that there can be found in American folk a community as deep, as electric, as perverse and as conflicted as all America, and that the songs Dylan recorded out of the public eye, in a basement in Woodstock, are where that community as a whole gets to speak

• The Nation

  The country mapped in this book is not Woody Guthrie's land made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America'