Today is a rebroadcast of a recent show at our new day and new time for Bibliocracy Radio on KPFK: Wednesdays, at 2;30. I am really proud of this interview with Greil Marcus on his A New Literary History of America. The arrival of any book written or edited by Marcus marks a happy day indeed, and the publication of this big one on a big theme means a happy couple of weeks or months of reading and thinking and rereading. Fans of his previous landmark critical and creative work --- take-aparts of rock’n’roll, politics and American culture in Lipstick Traces, Mystery Train, The Rose and the Briar --- will recognize his singular imagination and ambition, and welcome a project perhaps only Greil Marcus could take on. With co-editor Werner Sollors, he has organized a literary compendium, an encyclopedia, an anthology of essays about all things American, from 1507 to 2009, Amerigo Vespuci to Barack Obama. The collection, remarkable for its vision and energy, is A New Literary History of America, and it delivers big-time, with the same welcome idiosyncracy, creativity and enthusiasm, offering secret and not-so-secret histories of our weird, wonderful land in 200 original literary essays commissioned just for this project, written by Walter Mosley, Bharati Mukherjee, Andrei Codrescu, to name, as they say, only a few. Read about it on the nifty Harvard University Press website (http://newliteraryhistory.com/) and join me today at 2:30. Thanks for listening. Happy T-giving! And listen next week for a brand-new show.
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