Andrei Codrescu

twenty years of writings from the city

New Orleans, mon amour

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.

Twenty Years of Writings from the City

New Orleans, Mon Amour

"The Poetry Lesson is a must-have manual for emerging poetry-monsters; a book of caveats for the peddlers of "creative" snake oil; an archaeo-psychological scan of instantly obsolete technology; the memoir of a professor relectantly abandoning his sex fantasies; the collected portrait of deluded youth about to find out something horrific; an affectionate treatise on poetry as a cure of hubris; and a de profundis moan of flesh turning into fortune cookies" --Cover, p. 4.

The poetry lesson

"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."

tzara and lenin play chess

The Posthuman Dada Guide: tzara and lenin play chess

Coast to Coast Late in the Century

Road Scholar

A Romanian poet-in-exile returns to his native country in the wake of the 1987 revolution that overthrew communist dictator Nicholai Ceausescu, and examines the changes in the country and their effect on him

A Romanian Exile's Story of Return and Revolution

The Hole in the Flag

Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, an American journalist, comes to terms with his infamous ancestor, Countess Elizabeth Bathory of Hungary, a cruel and vicious murderess who, in the seventeenth century, bathed in the blood of virgins to preserve her beauty and youth. Reprint.

The Blood Countess

A National Public Radio reporter offers a selection of interviews with the people of Cuba, from prostitutes to architects, which, combined with expert photographs, give a surprising and unprejudiced view of a fascinating and lively country. Reprint. 10,000 first printing.

A Socio-Erotic Journey

Ay, Cuba!

Codrescu has an amazing instinct for comic revelatory detail (and can) make provocative . . . connections among the stray facts of the everyday.--San Francisco Chronicle. The reason he's adored is that he's smack in the tradition of the lovable, unthreatening curmudgeons such as Fred Allen and Andy Rooney. . . . Quite a feat.--Booklist.

Raised by Puppets, Only to be Killed by Research

The History of the Growth of Heaven

Short Stories

Monsieur Teste in America & Other Instances of Realism

Selected Poems, 1970-1980

A rollicking story of the strangest creative writing class ever—as only Andrei Codrescu could tell it "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.

The Poetry Lesson

A Serious Morning

The Life and Times of an Involuntary Genius

The NPR reporter offers an “engaging and enlightening” window into late-90s Cuba, “from the cafes in Havana to the mysterious lairs of Santiago de Cuba” (Kirkus Reviews). For NPR commentator Andrei Codrescu, reporting from Cuba on the eve of Pope John Paul II’s 1998 visit was an opportunity to understand the realities of life in a country that has long been the subject of stereotypes and misconceptions. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Cuba was the last place to witness a “laboratory of pre-post-communism,” as it toed the line between its socialist past and its uncertain future. On the streets of Havana and the beaches of Santiago de Cuba, Codrescu met people from all walks of life—from prostitutes and fortunetellers to bureaucrats and writers—eager to share their stories. Uncensored and compassionate, his interviews reveal a world where destruction and beauty, poverty and pride exist side by side. Traveling with photographer David Graham, whose powerful images illustrate the energy pulsing through everyday life in Cuba, Codrescu captures the humanity of a nation that is lost when it’s reduced to a political symbol. With the United States resuming relations with Cuba for the first time in decades, Ay, Cuba! is more relevant now than ever before.

This anthology is obsessed with reputations: Frank O'Hara is praised in several poems, while Robert Lowell is derided in one as an "Old White-haired Coot." However, the poetry itself is exciting, with the hopped-up, feverish quality suggested by this anthology's subtitle. It is also a reliable guide to alternative poetic strategies. ISBN 0-941423-03-4: $17.95; ISBN 0-941423-04-2 (pbk.): $11.95.

Up Late

American Poetry Since 1970

Diana Grove (humorist.)

Driven by mischief and a sense of the absurd, author Diana Grove seeks revenge on Internet con men by beating them at their own game. Responding to spam email with outrageous fictional characters, she leads the cyber crooks on an uproarious journey of bait and switch. As wild and weird as New Orleans - the city where it was written, Dot.Conned is more than just sweet revenge for victims of Internet fraud, it's a laugh-out-loud joy ride that proves all it takes to con a con man is a computer and a twisted sense of humor. It's comedic improv with real-life bad guys!

The Outrageously Funny, 100% True Accounts of Conning Internet Con Men

Dot. Conned

Ever wondered where that demonic voice on NPR comes from? In these memoirs, Codrescu recalls his life with irrepressible and uncensored candor. From the bitter-sweet delights of a fantastic childhood in the ruins of a Transylvanian castle to the horror and ecstasy of re-inventing himself as an American in a new language, this Proustian romp brims with erotic delight and language at high heat. In an age rife with "memoirs" set on grinding dull axes, Codrescu's razersharp language is both pitiless and unsparing of his experience.

In America's Shoes

This is the candid account of author, essayist and broadcaster Andrei Codrescu's life. From a bitter-sweet childhood in a Transylvanian castle to the horrors of the Ceausescu years, the author eventually re-invents himself in a new country.

Andrei Codrescu

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