Wakefield
(Algonquin Books, 2004)

WAKEFIELD zig-zags on wheels of comic brilliance, totally flattening a lot of useless architecture   --   physical and psychological   --   along the way. -- Tom Robbins

Codrescu has written a tour de force comedy in which he proves--as did Dante and Milton and Goethe and Mark Twain before him--that Beezlebub is literature's best character. He also confirms the internationally agreed-upon notion that America is the devil's ripest ground. I laughed out loud. -- Mary Karr

Casanova in Bohemia
A Novel
(Free Press, 2002)

Beloved NPR commentator and popular author Andrei Codrescu makes a stunning return to historical fiction, detailing the adventurous life and erotic times of the famed illuminist Giacomo Casanova.

In his national bestseller The Blood Countess, Andrei Codrescu brought to life the bloodthirsty royal Elizabeth Bathory, who embodied nearly all the contradictions of the seventeenth century. Now he depicts the astonishing life of the legendary Casanova, as the old adventurer relives his life while writing his memoirs in a provincial Bohemian castle at the end of the eighteenth century. Far from being defeated by age, Casanova delights in the maidservants, reacts with intellectual vigor to the unfolding of the French Revolution, and collaborates with Mozart on Don Giovanni. Long considered the rhapsodist of an age of aristocratic mirth, scandal, and innumerable affairs, Casanova was also a first-rate intellect who corresponded and argued with Voltaire and Rousseau. His published work, besides the celebrated History of My Life, includes a multivolume fantasy fiction novel that predates and anticipates Jules Verne; translations of Italian classics into French; and a number of plays that were produced on the great stages of Europe.

Casanova's romantic legend overshadowed his literary work, which was, for the most part, not published until 1960. The fate of his writings was nearly as fabulous and intriguing as that of their author. Still, even in abridged, bowdlerized, and fragmentary form, Casanova's memoirs have inspired writers as diverse as Flaubert, Stendhal, Hermann Hesse, and now, Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu's vivid fictional account illuminates the interest we still have in this uncompromising and magical libertine, while it imagines how his life would have continued if Casanova's immortality had extended beyond the literary.

In Codrescu's retelling of the Casanova legend, readers are introduced to an age far less inhibited than our own, and far more interesting in its vices. At once a libertine, a defender of women, a reactionary, a revolutionary, a brilliant observer, and a visionary, Casanova was a man ahead of his time both in thought and in action. Finally, in this inventive and absorbing work, Casanova is given due credit for his writings, his philosophies, and, of course, for the amorous magic that has been made known to so many.

An Involuntary Genius in America's Shoes
(And What Happened Afterwards)
(Black Sparrow Press, 2001)

In New York City in 1969, Andrei Codrescu, a Romanian poet just beginning to master the American vernacular, began writing The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius (1975), a memoir of antic Communist youth now recognized as a classic of comic self-creation. “There I was, twenty-three years old, the possessor of a wealth of experience which had already spawned an equal if not greater quantity of mythicizing anecdotes.” Anecdote 1: He was the intellectual love child of Transylvania1s great culture heroes, Dracula and Ionesco, twin totems of the Immortal and the Absurd. Anecdote 2: He was a political exile from Communist Europe, and everyone knows that all exiles are geniuses. A later anecdote — the one about the enormous file the INS had collected on him and his left-wing Neo-Beat activities — provides the subject of the sequel, In America’s Shoes (1983), the mock epic of his quest to become a U.S. citizen. This new book collects both of Codrescu’s memoirs, together with the now-middle-aged author’s wry notes on the young man who wrote them. While traveling the road from the Balkan forest to the land of the free, he writes, “I never abandoned my rebellious Romanian generation, within which I’d been raised a baby dissident destined for great things and prison. I just put on a cape” — a Dracula cape, with a star-spangled lining — “to complete the picture.”

A Bar in Brooklyn
Novellas and Stories, 1970-1978
(Black Sparrow Press, 1999)

Andrei Codrescu's stories have been scattered in various literary journals, from The Paris Review to the Hot Water Review. They are now gathered for the first time in "A Bar in Brooklyn," Black Sparrow Press, a collection that spans an intense and creative time from 1970 until 1978. Prefaced by the author.

Thus Spake the Corpse
(Black Sparrow Press, 1999)

Edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal

THUS SPAKE THE CORPSE: AN EXQUISITE CORPSE READER, 1988-1998 is the long-awaited anthology from the pages of "Exquisite Corpse: a Journal of Books & Ideas," the decade's liveliest and most controversial literary magazine. Edited by Andrei Codrescu and Laura Rosenthal, published by Black Sparrow Press, this collection of over two hundred poets and essayists, represents some of the most brilliant and contentious literature of our time. Decried by some as "the New Yorker of the Avantgarde," and praised by others as "the light in the murk of current Am Lit," the Exquisite Corpse can now be savored in its spacious fullness. The second volume, containing translations, travel reports, and "lives of the poets," will be published by Black Sparrow in Spring 2,000.

Messiah: A Novel
(Simon & Schuster, 1999) (Simon & Schuster, 1999)

Chronicling the onset of millennial fever and the universal yearning for a Messiah, Andrei's latest novel is set against a backdrop of warring religious fundamentalist factions, social upheaval, and mystical inspiration. Messiah combines Codrescu's sonorous prose with mordant social commentary and incandescent characters.

Messiah combs through the artifacts of American millennial culture with adroit examinations of cyberspace, fundamentalist religion, sex, and the cult of celebrity. Set from December 1999 to Mardi Gras 2000, Messiah introduces two remarkable young women: Felicity, a girl detective in New Orleans, and Andrea, a Sarajevan orphan who has found asylum in Jerusalem after internment in a Serbian POW camp. Felicity and Andrea, both presciently self-aware, come to believe they are the two severed halves of a whole entity, eventually finding each other amid the chaos of millennial fervor. Their special mission: to fulfill an extraordinary destiny as Armageddon sweeps the earth.

In the months prior to their fated meeting, the charismatic Felicity attracts a group of followers, a tribe of pierced and tattooed young drifters called Shades, who, under the direction of Felicity and her inimitable uncle, Major Notz, come into epic conflict with their various enemies. Chief among them are Mullin, a powerful Christian fundamentalist preacher, and his ghoulish coterie of militant religious fanatics. All factions strive to establish themselves as saviors at the world's end and seek to manipulate the allegiances of the populace through all branches of the media. In the Big Easy at the turn of the century, there seems to be no shortage of would-be Messiahs.

Messiah is host to a world turned upside down, a universe teeming with battling eschatological forces, sexual and psychological perversity, and unlikely heroes. The interpenetration of earthly sensuality, prophecy, and cyberspace renders a complex and pulsating tale.

Ay, Cuba!
A Socio-Erotic Journey to Castro's Last Stand
with David Graham (Photographer)
(St. Martin's Press, 1999)

During a historic visit to Cuba--on the eve of Pope John Paul II's own trip-National Public Radio's Andrei Codrescu and photographer David Graham turned an unsparing but compassionate gaze upon Cuba. Registering the architecture, the bizarre two-tier economy of peso and dollar, the revivals of both Catholicism and the Afro-Cuban religion of santeria, and the sexual and social mores of a post-cold war communist society, Codrescu's words and Graham's photographs offer a vision of Cuba's brutally stark and sometimes tragic reality, as seen through the fascinating prism of Codrescu's own eccentric genius.

This portrait of a nation continually on the edge of history and politics will surprise and enlighten American readers, who have been misled by intransigent ideologues on both the right and the left. Indeed, Codrescu and Graham have transcended the often-petty American prejudices about Cuba, and have engaged the island nation's people on a level of intimacy that has never been seen before.

Through interviews with Cuban architects, writers, hustlers, prostitutes, and common working folk, Ay, Cuba! reveals a passionate society deeply in conflict with itself. This is not a cold, cross-sectioned study of Cuba, but rather a highly personal, human portrait of a proud, musical, smart, and sexy people.

Ay, Cuba! is thus a provocative reassessment of a world both familiar and unbearably exotic, only ninety miles from the coast of Florida, by one of America's most gifted social critics.

Hail Babylon!
In Search of the American City at the End of the Millennium
(St. Martin's Press, 1998) (St. Martin's Press, 1998)

In his most important nonfiction work since "Road Scholar", Andrei Codrescu takes readers cross-country through the increasingly alluring American urban landscape. From New York and Baltimore to New Orleans and Little Rock--and several cities in between--Codrescu considers "the city as wilderness", a place where the ecology of human desires and the work of the mind find their optimum conditions.

License to Carry a Gun
(Carnegie-Mellon Univ Press, 1998)

Synopsis pending...

Codrescu writes of people who are having dreams about cyberspace and others who are simply obsessed with it; about his experiences going back to his native Romania; about meeting Miss America; about traveling by bus and by plane; and about one very odd dog with her own Internet address. Throughout all of it, the reader is engaged by a deft tension between Codrescu's charmingly boundless optimism and his wry world-weariness.

No Tacos for Saddam  
Audio Cassette (Ten Speed Press Audio, 1997)

Sometimes grouch and always perspective commentator for NPR's All Things Considered, Codrescu talks of many things, from eternal life, the normal family, crab enchiladas, and obscenity in search of art to his hometown of Sibu, Romania.

The Blood Countess: A Novel
(Dell Books, 1996)

Andrei Codrescu has written a fascinating first novel based on the life of his real-life ancestor, Elizabeth Bathory, the legendary Blood Countess. Codrescu expertly weaves together two stories in this neo-gothic work: that of the 16th-century Hungarian Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a beautiful and terrifying woman who bathes in the blood of virgin girls; and of her distant descendent, a contemporary journalist who must return to his native Hungary and come to terms with his bloody and disturbing past.

Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, a Hungarian-born journalist who has lived in the United States, returns to his native Hungary, only to be the target for recruitment among a patriotic group that wants to restore the glory--and the horror--of the Hungarian aristocracy. As a descendent of the Countess Elizabeth Bathory, he is heir to all that is wonderful and terrible about his country and his family's past. Codrescu brilliantly explores Drake's anguish, as he realizes the truth behind his gruesome family history. But more importantly, Codrescu also creates a convincing and historically accurate picture of a sadistic woman obsessed with youth, vigor, beauty, and blood_a woman with enough power to order the deaths of 650 virgins so that she could bathe in their blood.

The Blood Countess is a bizarre and compelling book about the horrors of the past, shown so effectively in the monstrous yet attractive personality of Elizabeth, and what pull these horrors have on those who live now.

Alien Candor:
Selected Poems, 1970-1995
(Black Sparrow Press, 1996)

Language did not seem all that important," writes the Romanian-born Andrei Codrescu in the introduction to his Alien Candor: Selected Poems 1970-1995. "The main thing was being a poet." Codrescu, who cheerfully admits that he was just learning English when he wrote the first poems in the selection (it took him until 1973 to capitalize his I's), has never let lingusitic niceties limit self-expression. Fans of Codrescu's NPR commentaries will likely enjoy this retrospective in verse.

The Muse is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays
(Picador USA, 1995)

Trenchant, entertaining, often hilarious essays by NPR journalist and All things Considered commentator Codrescu. The essays, over half of which have never been published and none of which have appeared in book form, are quintessentially American--and also the work of someone raised at the school of Montaigne.

Road Scholar:
Coast to Coast Late in the Century
(Hyperion, 1993)

Andrei Codrescu describes his coast-to-coast journey across the United States, discussing the beatniks, ex-hippies, and poets in New York's East Village, a drive-through wedding in Las Vegas, and other oddities. Inspired by Kerouac's legendary paean to American wanderlust, On the Road, Codrescu sets out to discover for himself the wonders of the USA. Published to tie in with its companion PBS-TV special, the book sparkles with the author's wit and sardonic humor. 60 photos.

Zombification:
Stories from National Public Radio
(Picador USA, 1995)

Never at a loss for a trenchant comment, Andrei Codrescu has been chronicling the absurdities of American culture for over 10 years. This collection of essays includes lively riffs on whales, dreams, gypsies, and weather, as well as larger subjects such as the collapse of communism and radical change in American politics.

Other Works

ESSAYS:

The Devil Never Sleeps & Other Essays.
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000)

Hail Babylon! Looking for the American City at the End of the Millennium
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1998)

The Dog With the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR & Elsewhere
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1996)

Zombification: Essays from NPR
(New York: St. Martin's Press,1995; New York: Picador pp., 1996)

The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans
(New York: St. Martin's Press,1995; New York: Picador,1996)

The Disappearance of the Outside: a Manifesto for Escape
(Boston: Addison-Wesley Co.1990; a study of exile)

A Craving for Swan
(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,1988)

Raised by Puppets Only to Be Killed by Research
(Boston: Addison-Wesley Co.1987)

TRANSLATIONS:

At the Court of Yearning: Poems by Lucian Blaga
(Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press,1989; translation of Romania's great modern poet).

ANTHOLOGIES EDITED:

Thus Spake the Corpse: an Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998. Volume Two, Fictions, Travels, and Translations
(Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 2000)

Thus Spake the Corpse: an Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988-1998. Volume One, Poetry and Essays
(Santa Rosa: Black Sparrow Press, 1999)

American Poets Say Goodbye to the 20th Century
(New York:4 Walls/8 Windows, 1996)

American Poetry Since 1970: Up Late
(New York:4 Walls/8 Windows, 1988) Five printings.

The Stiffest of the Corpse: an Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1983-1990
(San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1990)

FILM:

Road Scholar.
Public Policy Productions. Feature documentary written by and starring Andrei Codrescu, produced by Roger Weisberg, directed by Roger Weisberg and Jean de Segonzac.
Winner: George Foster Peabody Award, Golden Eagle Award, Cine Festival; Chris Award, Columbus Film Festival. Best Documentary: Seattle International Film Festival; Best Documentary: San Francisco Film Festival. Distributed nationally by Samuel Goldwyn Co. Premiered on PBS, Fall 1994. Hallmark Video.

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