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Bob Dylan is not a poet. He is a singer-songwriter, a performing artist. The unit of his art, as collected and documented by his intended audience, is the live performance. Right now, no existing technological tool can give researchers ready access to his entire corpus of work. Revised from the author's Ph.D. dissertation (UC Berkeley, 1978) and again from its first edition (Indiana UP, 1982), Performed Literature develops a methodology for close analysis of verbal art that is heard, not seen, using as comparative examples 24 performances of 11 songs by Bob Dylan. The second edition adds a preface, two major appendices and one minor one, and a detailed index.

Previously published as Invisible Republic and already considered a classic of modern American cultural criticism, The Old, Weird America is Greil Marcus's widely acclaimed book on the secret music (the so-called "Basement Tapes") made by Bob Dylan and the Band while in seclusion in Woodstock, New York, in 1967--a folksy yet funky, furious yet hilarious music that remains as seductive and baffling today as it was more than thirty years ago. As Mark Sinker observed in 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." But the country mapped out in this book, as Bruce Shapiro wrote in The Nation, "is not Woody Guthrie's land for made for you and me . . . It's what Marcus calls 'the old, weird America.'" This odd terrain, this strange yet familiar backdrop to our common cultural history--which Luc Sante (in New York magazine) termed the "playground of God, Satan, tricksters, Puritans, confidence men, illuminati, braggarts, preachers, anonymous poets of all stripes"--is the territory that Marcus has discovered in Dylan's most mysterious music. And his analysis of that territory "reads like a thriller" (Ken Tucker, Entertainment Weekly) and exhibits "a mad, sparkling brilliance" (David Remnick, The New Yorker) throughout. This new edition of The Old, Weird America includes an updated discography.

(Creative Concepts Publishing). A classic souvenir collection of 46 hits from those Kings of Western Swing, complete with an introduction and an extensive photo section of the band through the years. Songs include: Across the Alley from the Alamo * All Night Long * A Big Ball in Cowtown (We'll Dance Around) * Blue Bonnet Lane * Eight'r from Decatur * Heart to Heart Talk * Honeysuckle Rose * I Needed You * Ida Red * Miss Molly * Oklahoma Hills (Guthrie/Guthrie) * Silver Bells (That Ring in the Night) * St. Louis Blues * Who's Sorry Now * and more!

Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2016 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Bob Dylan. On October 13, 2016, Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, recognizing his countless contributions to music and letters over the last fifty years. Some months later, he delivered an acceptance lecture that is now memorialized in book form for generations to come. In The Nobel Lecture, Dylan reflects on his life and experience with literature, providing both a rare artistic statement and an intimate look at a uniquely American icon. From finding inspiration in the music of Buddy Holly and Leadbelly to the works of literature that helped shape his own approach to writing—The Odyssey, Moby-Dick, and All Quiet on the Western Front—this is Dylan like you’ve never seen him before.

“Dylan remains the rare singer whose work is worth reading on the page. His words are consistently funny, alive to the sound of language, and of course appealingly cryptic.” —The New York Times Book Review A new collection of Bob Dylan’s most essential lyrics—one hundred songs that represent the Nobel Laureate’s incredible range through the entirety of his career so far. Bob Dylan is one of the most important cultural figures of our time, and the first American musician in history to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. 100 Songs is an intimate and carefully curated collection of his most important lyrics that spans from the beginning of his career through the present day. Perfect for students who may be new to Dylan’s work as well as longtime fans, this portable, abridged volume of these singular lyrics explores the depth, breadth, and magnitude of one of the world’s most enduring bodies of work.

The Philosophy of Modern Song is Bob Dylan’s first book of new writing since 2004’s Chronicles: Volume One—and since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his extraordinary insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. They are mysterious and mercurial, poignant and profound, and often laugh-out-loud funny. And while they are ostensibly about music, they are really meditations and reflections on the human condition. Running throughout the book are nearly 150 carefully curated photos as well as a series of dream-like riffs that, taken together, resemble an epic poem and add to the work’s transcendence. In 2020, with the release of his outstanding album Rough and Rowdy Ways, Dylan became the first artist to have an album hit the Billboard Top 40 in each decade since the 1960s. The Philosophy of Modern Song contains much of what he has learned about his craft in all those years, and like everything that Dylan does, it is a momentous artistic achievement.

Inspired by the real life post-divorce experiences of television comedy writer Danny Simon, The Odd Couple has touched multiple generations of fans. Playwright Neil Simon embellished his brother Danny's pseudo-sitcom situation and created an oil-and-water twosome with memorable characters showcasing the foibles of mankind. The original Broadway production enjoyed a run of 964 performances. The story of the cohabitation of Felix Ungar and Oscar Madison translated extremely well to the silver screen, and then in 1970 to television, where it brought weekly laughs and mirth to an even larger audience for five seasons in prime time. This thorough history details The Odd Couple in all its forms over the decades. It provides capsule biographies of the stage, film and television casts and crew, as well as an episode guide and a wealth of little-known information.