Books by Andrei Codrescu
New Orleans, Mon Amour: Twenty Years of Writings from the City
For two decades Npr commentator Andrei Codrescu has been living in and writing about his adopted city, where, as he puts it, the official language is dreams. How apt that a refugee born in Transylvania found his home in a place where vampires roam the streets and voodoo queens live around the corner; where cemeteries are the most popular picnic spots, the ghosts of poets, prostitutes, and pirates are palpable, and in the French Quarter, no one ever sleeps. Codrescu's essays have been called "satirical gems," "subversive," "sardonic and stunning," "funny," "gonzo," "wittily poignant," and "perverse"-here is a writer who perfectly mirrors the wild, voluptuous, bohemian character of New Orleans itself. This retrospective follows him from newcomer to near native: first seduced by the lush banana trees in his backyard and the sensual aroma of coffee at the café down the block, Codrescu soon becomes a Window Gang regular at the infamous bar Molly's on Decatur, does a stint as King of Krewe de Vieux Carré at Mardi Gras, befriends artists, musicians, and eccentrics, and exposes the city's underbelly of corruption, warning presciently about the lack of planning for floods in a city high on its own insouciance. Alas, as we all now know, Paradise is lost.New Orleans, Mon Amour is an epic love song, a clear-eyed elegy, a cultural celebration, and a thank-you note to New Orleans in its Golden Age.
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The Poetry Lesson
"Intro to Poetry Writing is always like this: a long labor, a breech birth, or, obversely, mining in the dark. You take healthy young Americans used to sunshine (aided sometimes by Xanax and Adderall), you blindfold them and lead them by the hand into a labyrinth made from bones. Then you tell them their assignment: 'Find the Grail. You have a New York minute to get it.'"--The Poetry Lesson
The Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a "typical fin-de-siècle salaried beatnik"--one with an antic imagination, an outsized personality and libido, and an endless store of entertaining literary anecdotes, reliable or otherwise. Neither a novel nor a memoir but mimicking aspects of each, The Poetry Lesson is pure Andrei Codrescu: irreverent, unconventional, brilliant, and always funny. Codrescu takes readers into the strange classroom and even stranger mind of a poet and English professor on the eve of retirement as he begins to teach his final semester of Intro to Poetry Writing. As he introduces his students to THE TOOLS OF POETRY (a list that includes a goatskin dream notebook, hypnosis, and cable TV) and THE TEN MUSES OF POETRY (mishearing, misunderstanding, mistranslating . . . ), and assigns each of them a tutelary "Ghost-Companion" poet, the teacher recalls wild tales from his coming of age as a poet in the 1960s and 1970s, even as he speculates about the lives and poetic and sexual potential of his twenty-first-century students. From arguing that Allen Ginsberg wasn't actually gay to telling about the time William Burroughs's funeral procession stopped at McDonald's, The Poetry Lesson is a thoroughly entertaining portrait of an inimitable poet, teacher, and storyteller.
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The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Public Square)
This is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life."―The Posthuman Dada Guide
The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world―all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Café de la Terrasse―a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution―lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada―and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources.
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no time like now: Poems (Pitt Poetry Series)
In Codrescu’s own words: “I wrote my first book of poems, License to Carry a Gun (Big Table, 1970), when I first lived in New York City, 1967–1970. Those were troubled times and I was 21 years-old. Decades later the city has changed and the times are still troubled. These poems, 2016–2018, try to find out just how changed my dear city and how troubled my days.”
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Jealous Witness
Born in Romania, Andrei Codrescu understands the spirit of his adopted New Orleans, a city that steadfastly “refuses to conform to anything that is known about it.” When Hurricane Katrina blew through, the New Orleans landscape changed yet again and Codrescu, like his hero, “tolstoy exhausted having just written russia,” recorded it all.
His “Maelstrom: Songs of Storm and Exile,” performed by the New Orleans Klezmer AllStars on the accompanying CD, form the heart of this collection honoring the dispossessed and the artists, lovers, and cultural icons who have influenced his life. As John Freeman wrote in the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Codrescu’s poetry sounds like what would happen if “Tom Waits and Muddy Waters collaborated on a book of verse” and shows why this celebrated National Public Radio commentator is such a memorable and fearless cultural critic.
Formed in 1991, the New Orleans Klezmer AllStars have fired up people of all ages with their funky, raucous interpretation of traditional Eastern European Jewish folk music. Featuring a lineup whose members all lead their own groups, the band’s tremendous crossover appeal has kept audiences dancing in the aisles at jazz venues, punk rock clubs, retirement homes, and university performance halls.
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So Recently Rent a World: New and Selected Poems
Raconteur, poet, and NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu delivers in his inimitable, irreverent style a collection that traverses subjects from aging to consumerism, to religion to mass media. Brilliantly funny yet deeply insightful, these poems illuminate Codrescu's acerbic tone and outsized personality and capture the best of his oeuvre.
Andrei Codrescu was born in Sibiu, Romania, in 1946, and immigrated to the United States in 1966. The author of more than thirty-five books, Codrescu has edited the literary magazine Exquisite Corpse, and his provocative commentary is featured regularly on National Public Radio's All Things Considered. Codrescu currently resides in Arkansas.
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Mel Chin: Rematch
by Andrei Codrescu, Lisa A. Crossman, Eleanor Heartney, Patricia Covo Johnson, Herb Tam, Miranda Lash, Patricia C. Phillips
Eschewing a trademark style, the common thread through Mel Chin’s practice is his conceptual rigor, thoughtful historicism and concern for social justice. His land-based works such as "Revival Field" from the early 1990s and "Operation Paydirt" (2008–ongoing) garnered significant international press for presenting the science of soil remediation as an art form. Challenging the traditional concept of a retrospective as a linear presentation of a single individual’s work over time, the publication celebrates the artist’s practice of constant evolution, re-examination, and collaboration. It includes an extensive illustrated chronology and an essay by the poet Andrei Codrescu, and is published on the occasion of a major Mel Chin exhibition at the New Orleans Museum of Art.
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A Brief History of Authoterrorism
by Andrei Codrescu, Ben Greenman, Terry Southern, David Rees, Nile Southern, Mark Jay Mirsky, Jeffrey Dorchen, Whitney Anne Trettien
In this collection of new short fiction, eight contemporary authors take aim against the hyperbole of the death of print by exploring just how far writers and artists will go to promote themselves in an evolving world where the laws of decorum no longer apply. Prophetic, harrowing, and at times laugh-out-loud humorous, these stories walk the fine line between fiction and fact, art and apocalypse, to chronicle a trend that cannot be ignored. The book includes a long-lost story by Terry Southern.
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Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments
An irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights
"I fear each passing night that I will not receive my maintenance dose of suspense, and then I will cease to exist."―Whatever Gets You through the Night
Whatever Gets You through the Night is an irreverent and deeply funny retelling of the Arabian Nights and a wildly inspired exploration of the timeless art of storytelling. Award-winning writer Andrei Codrescu reimagines how Sheherezade saved Baghdad's virgins and her own life through a heroic feat of storytelling―one that kept the Persian king Sharyar hanging in agonizing narrative and erotic suspense for 1001 nights. For Sheherezade, the end of either suspense or curiosity means death, but Codrescu keeps both alive in this entertaining tale of how she learned to hold a king in thrall, setting with her endless invention an unsurpassable example for all storytellers across the ages. Liberated and mischievous, Codrescu's Sheherezade is as charming as she is shrewd―and so is the story Codrescu tells.
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An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes: And What Came Afterward
Andrei Codrescu proves a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life.
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