What Nails It

by Greil Marcus

Overview

From a celebrated critic, a heartfelt and adventurous reflection on the art of writing about art
 
“Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
 
“Writers write. They can’t help it. They can’t not.” In this spirited book, the revered cultural critic Greil Marcus explains his compulsion as a yearning for fun, for play, and, most of all, to discover—to feel the moment when a creation speaks in its own voice.
 
Marcus reflects on over half a century spent honing the art of attention—from his California childhood, overshadowed by mystery and silence surrounding his father’s death, to his discovery of the critic Pauline Kael, to a confrontation with a sixteenth-century painting in Venice. Through it all, he invites readers to join him in exploring the revolutionary power of art: what it is, why it captures us, and how it forces us to confront what we think we know and who we think we are. Art challenges us to see the world differently, Marcus argues, and the role of the critic is to enact this perspective.
 
Funny and poignant, What Nails It is a tribute to the indispensable art of criticism by one of its greatest practitioners.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780300285529
Publisher:	Yale University Press
Publication date:	09/16/2025
Series:	Why I Write
Pages:	104
Product dimensions:	4.75(w) x 7.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Greil Marcus is the author of many books, from Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll Music in 1975 to Folk Music: A Bob Dylan Biography in Seven Songs in 2022. With Werner Sollors he is the editor of A New Literary History of America (2009).

Editorial Reviews

06/17/2024

Former Rolling Stone columnist Marcus (Folk Music) explores his relationship to criticism and analyzes some of his favorite albums and films in this illuminating installment of Yale’s “Why I Write” series. Marcus begins the account in 1968, at the start of his career, when he began freelancing for Rolling Stone even as he privately believed criticism to be “pompous and pretentious, as if it were a form of expertise.” It was only when he became an editor at the magazine the following year that he grew to respect the practice as “an analysis of one’s own response to something out there in the world,” and enthusiastically dove into evaluating albums by the likes of Bob Dylan and the Rolling Stones. Though Marcus is best-known for his music writing, the most effective sections focus on film: he incisively describes the “uncanny sense that what was happening didn’t have to happen” evoked by The Manchurian Candidate, delivers a persuasive rejoinder to the notion that the opening of Blue Velvet is satirical, and recounts his conversations with Pauline Kael after he publicly criticized her writing. Through it all, Marcus remains lucid, erudite company. For music and film lovers and aspiring critics alike, this is a treat. Agent: Emily Forland, Brandt & Hochman Literary. (Aug.)

Publishers Weekly

Marcus is safely among the first three names a young rock writer will encounter (and pretty likely the first) so it’s interesting to learn what set him off.”—Michael Prodger, New Statesman

“Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Marcus remains lucid, erudite company. For music and film lovers and aspiring critics alike, this is a treat.”—Publishers Weekly

“Rich. . . . The pages show a nimble, purposeful mind at work.”—Chris Vognar, San Francisco Chronicle

“Marcus is a steady hand. . . . He (and his spirit force) still writes the best rock criticism over land and sea.”—Mark Watkins Reviews (blog)

“Another Marcus book that is far more than its title and its subject; the interest lies in the peregrination of the author’s imagination. . . . You become subsumed into the expansiveness and erudition of his mind.”—Jack Walters, PopMatters, “Best Books of 2024”

“At his best, Marcus gives us coordinates for a kind of writing that does not know it all in advance.”—Mitch Therieau, Chronicle of Higher Education

“The degree to which Greil Marcus jumps across epochs, art forms, and songs in a single bound is that he could almost rival Bob Beamon for his Olympic record; What Nails It is that impressive. The pleasure is seeing where his train of thought will lead you—and not.”—Jack Walters, Pop Matters

Recommended holiday reading by Nob Hill Gazette

From the Publisher

★ 2024-05-25
The éminence grise of rock criticism turns in notes on writing and its motivations.

For Marcus, perhaps the most insightful student of the works of Bob Dylan, writing is fun and play, but more, exploration: “I write to discover what I want to say and how to say it—and the nerve to say it.” The “want to say” part unfolds in its own time, but the “how to say it” part enters into the realm of the ineffable. In this latest installment in the publisher’s Why I Write series, Marcus examines how certain words fall in a certain order from a writer’s pen: how Dylan arrived at the lyrics for “Like a Rolling Stone,” how David Lynch pieced together his odd assemblage of weird Americana for the opening sequence ofBlue Velvet, how Marcus himself, former writer and editor forRolling Stone, arrived at the title for his book on Dylan-meets-weird-Americana,Invisible Republic (“There was no thought involved at all—only that ghost Bob Dylan talked about, a trickster ghost”). The author evokes three other ghosts as sources and inspirations—the first his biological father, who died in the Pacific typhoon that inspired a critical moment in Herman Wouk’s novelThe Caine Mutiny; the great and irascible film critic Pauline Kael; and the Italian Renaissance artist Titian, who prompts in Marcus the existential-angst question whether there really is a high culture and a “pop” culture and whether high culture must be religiously informed, yielding a brilliant aperçu: “There are whole worlds around us that we have never seen.” As ever, Marcus sheds allusions to do Sontag or Steiner proud, and in that respect, the last line of his piece on Kael is worth the price of admission alone.

Essential for fans of Marcus and fruitful reading for anyone reflecting on the mysteries of art.

Kirkus Reviews