Algonquin Books  January 2006


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.

In this lovely collection of very short essays, gravelly voiced NPR commentator Codrescu sketches finely honed portraits of a fabled city and its equally fabled inhabitants. The author, who has called the Big Easy home for two decades, shows how, like some gigantic bohemian magnet, New Orleans attracts some of the world's most talented, self-indulgent freaks. -- Publishers Weekly read more praise about New Orleans, Mon Amour...

Algonquin Books  May 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  read more praise for Wakefield...

Coffeehouse Press, September 2003

In praise of his poetry, The New York Times calls Andrei Codrescu "one of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers." He is also an audacious and passionate poet whose new work is the perfect tonic for America’s political, literary, and cultural hangovers. The heart of this first new collection in nearly a decade is an elegant conceit containing the “recently discovered” correspondence between a warrior and a courtesan in fourteenth-century China. This sequence offers a seductively beautiful contrast to poems about modern life and millennial malaise that are both unsparing and intimate, inventive and playful. More...

Black Sparrow Press, 2001

Ruminator Books, 2001

This cultural-literary-social critique examines why, when a society moves from a repressive system of government wrought with censorship and oppression to a free state representing unlimited possibilities, the art once created and treasured by that population is taken for granted. Taking into account his own exile from Stalinist Romania, as well as the plights of such greats as Garcia Marquez, Breton, Dada, Kundera, and Milosz, Codrescu issues a call for those living in a free society to reach beyond a benign reality founded in technology and commercialism by tapping into their imaginations and striving for a better, evolutionary existence.

Black Sparrow Press, 2000

Before suspending publication earlier this year, Andrei Codrescu's notorious anti-literary magazine EXQUISITE CORPSE -- founded on the belief that "American literature, poetry in particular, is sick from lack of public debate" -- had become a primary site of a controversial, engaged dialogue on art and culture. THUS SPAKE THE CORPSE collects the best essays and poems from the journal's last ten years of existence; contributors include James Broughton, Robert Creeley, Alice Notley, Carl Rakosi, Ed Sanders, Kay Boyle, Tom Clark, James Laughlin, Laura Rosenthal, Joel Oppenheimer, Anselm Hollo, and many others. More...

Black Sparrow Press, 1999

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. More...

St. Martin's Press, 2000

"The Devil never sleeps because he's got too much to do and the things he's already done keep him awake. So the Devil is no different than your average American with too much to do and too much to think about. If there is a difference between the Devil and the average Joe, it is only that the Devil feels no guilt." More...

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. More...

A brilliantly conceived tale of messianic longing, set as Armageddon rages across the globe at the turn of the millennium. More...

by Andrei Codrescu with photographys by David Graham
St. Martin's Press, February 1999

When Romanian exile and National Public Radio commentator Andrei Codrescu was given an assignment by his producer to travel to Cuba just before the pope's historic visit in 1998, he jumped at the chance. Cuba had been on his mind for years as part of his pursuit to understand the mysterious demise of Communism in Eastern Europe. Castro's Cuba, he felt, was the only place that held the clues to this demise; it was a "laboratory of pre-post-communism" where he could witness "a decomposing ideology before all its elements transmuted into the noxious gases that gag Eastern Europe now." More...

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. More...

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. More...

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 Sibiu, Romania.

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 descendant, a contemporary journalist who must return to his native Hungary and come to terms with his bloody and disturbing past.

Drake Bathory-Kereshbur, 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 honor - of the Hungarian aristocracy. As a descendant 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. More...

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Gert Town Records, 1997

Written and Narrated by Andrei Codrescu
Music by Mark Bingham

Click here for a soundclip - you will need RealPlayer G2, available free from www.real.com.

William Morrow and Co., 1991

The Hole in the Flag is Andrei Codrescu's personal account of the fall of a tyrannical regime, and the exhilaration of a country reborn. He shares the triumph of the workers and citizens on the festive New Year's streets, and reunites with old friends and colleagues that he left behind. With he keen eye of a reporter, Codrescu reveals the hideous secrets of the Ceausescu nightmare that lasted forty five years. Yet the reality of what Romania has in store once the parades have ended is described best from the heart of a poet. The combination of sensibilities creates a startlingly truthful perspective - a personal portrayal of political history. More...

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 linguistic niceties limit self-expression. Fans of Codrescu's NPR commentaries will likely enjoy this retrospective in verse. More...

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. More...

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 waderlust, 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. More...

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Signed editions available from the author. Please email Andrei for more information.

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 riffe on whales, dreams, gypsies, and weather, as well as larger subjects such as the collapse of communism and radical change in American politics. More...