Andrei Codrescu Books In Order

Novels

  1. The Repentance of Lorraine (1993)
  2. The Blood Countess (1995)
  3. Messiah (1999)
  4. Casanova in Bohemia (2002)
  5. Wakefield (2004)
  6. Whatever Gets You through the Night (2011)
  7. Messi@ (2015)

Collections

  1. Monsieur Teste in America & Other Instances of Realism (1987)
  2. Zombification (1994)
  3. Ends and Beginnings (1994)
  4. A Bar in Brooklyn (1999)
  5. New Orleans, Mon Amour (2006)
  6. Japanese Tales of Lafcadio Hearn (2019)

Anthologies edited

  1. American Poets Say Goodbye To The Twentieth Century (1996)
  2. Exquisite Corpse Annual #1 (2009)
  3. Exquisite Corpse Annual #2 (2010)

Non fiction

  1. The Life & Times of an Involuntary Genius (1975)
  2. A Craving for Swan (1986)
  3. Raised By Puppets (1989)
  4. The Hole in the Flag (1991)
  5. Road Scholar (1993)
  6. The Muse Is Always Half-dressed in New Orleans (1993)
  7. The Dog with the Chip in His Neck (1996)
  8. Hail Babylon! (1998)
  9. Ay, Cuba! (1999)
  10. The Devil Never Sleeps (2000)
  11. Thus Spake the Corpse (2000)
  12. An Involuntary Genius in Americas Shoes (2001)
  13. The Posthuman Dada Guide (2009)
  14. The Poetry Lesson (2010)
  15. Bibliodeath (2012)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

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Andrei Codrescu Books Overview

The Blood Countess

Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and journalist, 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 sad*istic 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.

Messiah

Two extraordinary women, Felicity, a Creole orphan, and Andrea, who found asylum in Jerusalem after time in a Serbian POW camp, meet in New Orleans. Somehow, they understand that they will embody the Messiah as Armageddon races across the globe.

Casanova in Bohemia

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.

Wakefield

What is the connection between breast enlargement and building renovation, yoga retreats and gourmet restaurants, cell phones and globalization? Wakefield, both the title of Andrei Codrescu’s hilariously absurd and brilliantly observed novel and the name of its alienated hero, examines these and other perplexities of the late twentieth century. Picture Wakefield: He’s divorced, lives alone in a comfortable, book filled apartment in a sophisticated city. A motivational speaker, his talks leave audiences dispirited and anxious. But for this peculiar talent, he’s nicely paid by corporate America, and he’s in demand. Then one day the Devil shows up, walks right into Wakefield‘s tasteful living room, and says, ‘Time’s up.’ Just as literary Fausts have done for centuries, Wakefield makes a bargain with Satan, who as it turns out, is having his own existential crisis due to bureaucratic headaches and younger upstart demons in the afterworld. The Devil gives Wakefield a year to find an authentic life or else it’s curtains. So Wakefield travels across the country meeting New Age gurus, billionaire techno geeks, global pioneers, gambling addicts and models who look like hero*in addicts, venture capitalists, art collectors, rainforest protectors, and S and M strippers. Andrei Codrescu brings his unique vision to the American character: our desire to change, renovate, and improve both our inner and outer worlds; to remodel not only our buildings but our bodies and minds. Wakefield is an inspired novel part metaphysical mystery, part travel adventure, part architectural romp by turns funny and deadly serious.

Whatever Gets You through the Night

‘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 NightWhatever 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.

Zombification

‘The world is undergoing Zombification. It was gradual for a while, a few zombies here and there, mostly in high office, where being a corpse in a suit was de rigueur…
The worst part about zombies raging unchecked is the slow paralysis they induce in people who aren’t quite zombies yet.’Never at a loss for a trenchant comment or off beat imagery, National Public Radio’s Andrei Codrescu has long been considered an eloquent if often sardonic expert on the absurdities of American culture. The essays in Zombification all taken from this poet’s popular commentaries for NPR were broadcast during the late 1980s and early 1990s, a period that witnessed the collapse of Communism, radical changes in American politics and society, and the birth of new nations. These large subjects along with lively riffs on dozens of topics, both timely and timeless, both everyday and strange are treated with Codrescu’s inimitable wit, insight, and candor. Included here are ‘Seven Embryos for Seven Lawyers,’ ‘Dali in Vegas,’ ‘Culture Vultures and Casserole Widows,’ and other classics.

A Bar in Brooklyn

Fiction. Since emigrating to the U.S. from his native Romania in 1966, Andrei Codrescu has blazed a rocket bright trail across the cultural landscape of his adopted country, gaining a national audience as a public radio commentator, television personality, and editor of the radical literary journal EXQUISITE CORPSE. A Bar in Brooklyn collects his shorter fiction of the 1970s. ‘Older exiles who, as myself, had come here without speaking a word of English, guarded their simple secrets carefully because their vampiric ambitions depended on them…
I had to go it alone, something I have a horror of.’ Andrei Codrescu is the author of BELLIGERENCE Coffee House Press, available from SPD.

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 caf 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 Carr 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.

American Poets Say Goodbye To The Twentieth Century

The editors of this anthology asked more than one hundred American poets from divergent backgrounds and literary traditions the following question: How would you say goodbye to the 20th century? Writers both new and established are represented here, including Paul Auster, Charles Bukowski, Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, Maxine Kumin, Carolyn Kizer, Charles Simic, David Trinidad, and Anne Waldman.

Exquisite Corpse Annual #1

Exquisite Corpse Annual #1 contains poetry, fiction, essays, reviews, artwork, etc., by Diane di Prima, Aram Saroyan, Jerome Rothenberg, Robin Becker, Alice Notley, Dave Brinks, Lance Olsen, Davis Schneiderman, Mike Topp, Willie Smith, Garry Craig Powell, Joel Dailey, Ruxandra Cesereanu, Bob May, Skip Fox, and more more more!!!

Road Scholar

Inspired by the classic Kerouac tradition of mixing writing with wanderlust, poet and National Public Radio regular Andrei Codrescu chronicles his own picaresque trek through America in this raucous, resonant memoir. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year in Hyperion hardcover.

The Muse Is Always Half-dressed in New Orleans

In twenty six essays, Codrescu turns his skeptical, amused gaze to such topics as Plato’s effect on American sex, the cultural meaning of Ed McMahon, baseball’s literary underpinnings, his own conception in a Romanian darkroom, an cuisine under the Ceausescu dictatorship, as well as to larger subjects, including the suicide of communism, American culture and politics, and his adopted city of New Orleans.

The Dog with the Chip in His Neck

The National Public Radio commentator shares stories about the rise of the American religious right, the ascendance of vampirism, America in the age of the computer chip, and other subjects.

Hail Babylon!

Andrei Codrescu, longtime observer and commentator on things odd and American, takes us on a personal tour through our withered yet increasingly alluring urban landscapes. Our trusted, if sometimes irreverent, guide visits New York, Baltimore, New Orleans, Little Rock, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Las Vegas, San Francisco, and Portland, Oregon and points beyond, including Oxford, Mississippi; Salem, Oregon; and California’s seaside jewel, La Jolla. Codrescu while recognizing that cities are under attack by the political right, buffeted by the ever proliferating prefab town house, beset by crime, and questioned from within shows us that they are also still flourishing, in fact becoming invaluable models of multiethnic, multicultural living. Taken together, these striking urban portraits sound an extremely hopeful message as Codrescu astutely considers ‘the city as wilderness,’ a place where the ecology of human desires and the work of the mind find their optimum conditions.

Ay, Cuba!

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 reas*sessment 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.

The Devil Never Sleeps

The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world not even in Codrescu’s native Transylvania is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ‘a pre apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single woosh’ in one of his commentaries on National Public, NPR received forty thousand letters in a protest spearheaded by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Codrescu was warned to ‘stay away from eschatology.’Thankfully for us, he hasn’t. In The Devil Never Sleeps, one of America’s shrewdest social critics sets out to uncover the Devil’s most modern and insidiously banal incarnations. Once easily recognizable by his horns, tail, and propensity for plague, today’s Devil has become embedded in every fiber of our culture. Discussing everything from rock ‘n’ roll to William Burroughs to New Orleans bars to the Demon of Prosperity, Codrescu mockingly unmasks Old Nick as the opportunistic technocrat he really is. Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today banality. In a world teeming with distractions, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil perhaps they are one and the same, we’ve become as twenty four hour society, swinging desperately between tedium and terror and sleeping fitfully, if at all. As Codrescu points out, The Devil Never Sleeps because we just won’t let him. With his characteristic charm and playful exuberance, Andrei Codrescu has successfully teased the Devil out from the darkest recesses and comic excesses of the human experience. The Devil Never Sleeps is his most wonderfully perverse book yet.

Thus Spake the Corpse

From 1983 to 1998, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas delighted the indignant and the sophisticated and gave heartburn to the fearful and the tenured. A thorn in the side of the Literary Establishment, it attracted a cadre of contributors united by a kind of suicidal fearlessness against The Way We Think Now. Here, in two generous volumes, the editors choose some of their favorite items from an over rich decade. These are the pieces that set the standard, enraged some people, and made the magazine necessary to those readers who, in the words of the editors, ‘banged their fists on unread stacks of New Yorkers and cried out as one, ‘Where were you when we were dying for lack of real poetry and speculation?’ ‘Highlights: Poetry by Antler, James Broughton, Hayden Carruth, Tom Clark, Robert Creeley, John Giorno, Anselm Hollo, David Ignatow, James Laughlin, Gerard Malanga, Joel Oppenheimer, James Purdy, Carl Rakosi, Ed Sanders, and ninety 90! others. Three dozen essays, including ‘Is Literature Useful?’ by Georges Bataille, ‘The American Male,’ by Kay Boyle, ‘The Surregionalist Manifesto,’ by Max Cafard, ‘My Abortion,’ by Deborah Salazar, and ‘Letters from the Proud Highway,’ by Hunter S. Thompson. The best of Laura Rosenthal’s column ‘The Body Bag,’ which responded to would be contributors with witty encouragement and, occasionally, devastating criticism. And letters from Clayton Eshleman, Edward Field, Ishmael Reed, and others.

An Involuntary Genius in Americas Shoes

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 Transylvania’s 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.’

The Posthuman Dada Guide

‘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 GuideThe 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 Caf 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,’ ‘internets,’ 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.’

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 LessonThe Poetry Lesson is a hilarious account of the first day of a creative writing course taught by a ‘typical fin de si cle 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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