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Although the Sex Pistols shape the beginning and the end of the story, LIPSTICK TRACES is not a book about music; it is about a common voice, discovered and transmitted in many forms. Working from scores of previously unexamined and untranslated essays, manifestos, and filmscripts, from old photographs, dada sound poetry, punk songs, collages, and classic texts from Marx to Henri Lefebvre, Marcus takes us deep behind the acknowledged events of our era, into a hidden tradition of moments that would seem imaginary except for the fact that they are real: a tradition of shared utopias, solitary refusals, impossible demands, and unexplained disappearances. Written with grace and force, humor and an insistent sense of tragedy and danger, LIPSTICK TRACES tells a story as disruptive and compelling as the century itself.

"[This book is] a highly subjective account of rebellious gestures that recur from decade to decade, often in remarkably similar incarnations. Marcus doesn't belabor the division between high and low--he just ignores it, fluidly shifting from (sometimes obscure) source to source. Dada leads to punk leads to Police Academy, and Elvis movies prompt analyses of the Left Bank. Natch! That Marcus can kick off and end his exhaustive, but always clear-headed, cross-epochal trek with the Sex Pistols--and make it all cohere--is but one indication of how fully he meshes the academy and the gutter."

Katherine Dieckmann, Voice Literary Supplement

"A book about the twilight zone of art and revolution...[that] displays an intellectual confidence, or nerve, that more than convinces the reader to follow its unmarked trails."

Gail Caldwell, Boston Globe

Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century: Search Results