Description: 'In August 2016 I received an email from Jeff Rosen, Bob Dylan's majordomo. I had been getting occasional writing assignments from Bob through Jeff for years, and they were extremely various: speeches, press kits, prefaces, a Buick commercial. Now he explained that he and Bob had been discussing a film project, to focus on his "Gospel Years," 1979-1980. They had some great footage-not the rather stiff performances intended for an unmade TV special, but the rougher takes made for pick-ups. Bob had the thought that he'd like to interrupt the footage with sermons delivered by an actor. Would I consider writing the sermons?' Lucy Sante (from her introduction to the Tenement Press edition), 2024.
Brief description: Lucy Sante's books include Low Life (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003), Kill All Your Darlings (Verse Chorus Press, 2007), The Other Paris (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2015), Maybe the People Would Be the Times (Verse Chorus Press, 2020), and the memoir, I Heard Her Call My Name (Heinemann, 2024). Greil Marcus is the author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Harvard University Press, 1989). He contributed an introduction to the New York Review Books edition of Constance Rourke's 1931 American Humor: A Study of the National Character. He was born in San Francisco and lives in Oakland.