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THE
MUSE IS ALWAYS HALF DRESSED IN NEW ORLEANS AND OTHER ESSAYS 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. |
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the Publisher: Andrei Codrescu, the National Public Radio commentator whose quick insights always leave you wanting more, takes us along on an intellectual adventure full of unexpected discoveries and terrifying recognitions in The Muse Is Always Half Dressed in New Orleans and Other Essays. This is a tough look at America through eyes that have not forgotten the terrors of Europe, for Codrescu sees his adopted homeland simultaneously as an outsider and an insider as he navigates the desperate surface of American life in the nineties. Codrescu's America is a country whose inhabitants ask obsessively, "Where are we?" and, like an impertinent cartographer of the imagination, Codrescu supplies the directions. The book's twenty-six essays employ critical prose that never abandons its bite, while providing an abundance of fertile questioning. Codrescu's kin are E.M. Cioran, Vladimir Nabokov, and Czeslaw Milosz, displaced aphorists propelled by an anguished lucidity. But in contrast to Cioran or Milosz, Codrescu has the fortune - some might say, misfortune - of commenting from within a culturally defoliated time when life and television (the Ed McMahon essay, among others, is hilariously funny!) are hard to tell apart. Codrescu's humor, which ranges from tonic to black, is soothing even as it slashes and burns. These essays, none of which have appeared in book form, are quintessentially American in their insistence on the lived and the seen, but they are also the work of someone raised at the school of the great sixteenth-century essayist Montaigne. |
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