Greil Marcus is a knight

Well he is now, at least. Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, The Dustbin of History, Dead Elvis: A Chronicle of a Cultural Obsession, and In the Fascist Bathroom: Punk in Pop Music, 1977-1992, among others, was made Chevalier dans l’ordre des Arts et Lettres by the French Government in order to honor his extraordinary contributions to arts and literature.

The award was presented at a ceremony in San Francisco at which Pierre-François Mourier, the French Consul General, spoke at length about Lipstick Traces and its reception in France, where it maintains a well-deserved place as a benchmark of cultural scholarship. According to a press release from the French Consulate:

The publication in France of “Lipstick Traces” by Allia Publisher, in 1998, had a huge impact on French readers and was highly celebrated in the press. The book, an investigation on rebellion in the XXth century, is one of the best and most precise studies of intellectual and artistic movements in France during this century: from the Dada to the Lettristes, from Isidore Isou to Guy Debord.

Lipstick Traces is currently available in a good-looking paperback edition, but the exciting news is that HUP will be publishing a special 20th-anniversary edition of the book in Fall 2009, timed to coincide with the appearance of the long-awaited and mammoth A New Literary History of America, co-edited by Marcus and Werner Sollors.