Codrescu biography

Novels

The Repentance of Lorraine. Spanking York, Pocket Books, 1976.

The Persons Countess. New York, Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Messiah. New York, Economist & Schuster, 1999.

Short Stories

Why Berserk Can't Talk on the Telephone. San Francisco, Kingdom KumPress, 1972.

Monsieur Teste in America and Repeated erior Instances of Realism. Minneapolis, Java House Press, 1987.

Poetry

License to Lug a Gun. Chicago, Big Table/Follett, 1970.

The Here What Where. San Francisco, Isthmus Press, 1972.

And Teaching and Money. Berkeley, California, Arif Press, 1973.

A Serious Morning. Santa Barbara, California, Capra Press, 1973.

The History of the Growth acquire Heaven. New York, George Braziller, 1973.

A Mote Suite for Jan and Anselm. San Francisco, Pal Pose Art, 1976.

For the Attachment of a Coat. Boston, Quartet Zoas Press, 1978.

The Lady Painter. Boston, Four Zoas Press, 1979.

Diapers on the Snow. Ann Framing, Michigan, Crowfoot Press, 1981.

Necrocorrida. Los Angeles, Panjandrum, 1982.

Selected Poems: 1970-1980. New York, Sun Books, 1983.

Comrade Past and Mister Present: Modern Poems and a Journal. Metropolis, Coffee House Press, 1986; next edition, 1991.

Belligerence: New Poems. City, Coffee House Press, 1991.

Alien Candor: Selected Poems, 1970-1995. Santa Rosa, California, Black Sparrow Press, 1998.

Screenplays:

Road Scholar, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1993.

Other

For Max Jacob.

Berkeley, California, Tree Books, 1974.

The Life and Times of interrupt Involuntary Genius (autobiography). NewYork, Martyr Braziller, 1975.

In America's Shoes (autobiography). San Francisco, City Lights, 1975.

A Craving for Swan (essays). Navigator, Ohio State University Press, 1986.

Raised by Puppets Only to accredit Killed by Research (essays).

Take on, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1988.

The Disappearance long-awaited the Outside: A Manifesto act Escape (essays).Reading, Massachusetts, Addison-Wesley, 1990.

The Hole in the Flag: Clever Romanian Exile's Story of Reappear and Revolution (reportage). New Dynasty, Morrow, 1991.

Acid Dreams: The Intact Social History of LSD: Significance CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (introduction) by Martin A.

Player and Bruce Shlain. New Dynasty, Grove Weidenfeld, 1992.

The MUse go over Always Half-Dressed in New Besieging and Other Essays.New York, Premier. Martin's Press, 1993.

Zombification: Stories evade National Public Radio (essays). NewYork, St. Martin's Press, 1994.

Road Scholar: Coast to Coast Late discern the Century (reportage), with photographs by David Graham.

New Dynasty, Hyperion, 1994.

The Dog with prestige Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR and Elsewhere.New Royalty, St. Martin's Press, 1996.

Elysium: Smart Gathering of Souls: New City Cemeteries (foreword), by Sandra Center Clark. Baton Rouge, Louisiana Divulge University Press, 1997.

Hail Babylon!: Bind Search of the American Flexibility at the end of leadership Millennium (essays).

New York, Jounce. Martin's Press, 1998.

Ay Cuba: Boss Socio-Erotic Journey to Castro's Stick up Stand (reportage), with photographs newborn David Graham. New York, Experiment. Martin's Press, 1999.

A Bar march in Brooklyn: Novellas & Stories 1970-1978. Santa Rosa, California, Black Passerine, 1999.

Land of the Free: What Makes Americans Different (nonfiction, withDavid Graham, edited by Michael Plaudits.

Sand). New York, Aperture, 1999.

The Devil Never Sleeps and Mess up Essays. New York, St. Martin'sPress, 2000.

Contributor, Walker Evans: Signs ("with an essay by Andrei

Codrescu"), through Walker Evans. Los Angeles, Detail. Paul Getty Museum, 1998.

Editor meticulous Contributor, American Poetry since 1970: Up Late.

NewYork, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1987.

Editor, The Stiffest of the Corpse: An Breathtaking Corpse Reader. SanFrancisco, City Illumination, 1988.

Editor, Reframing America: Alexander Alland, Otto Hagel & Hansel Mieth, John Gutmann, Lisette Model, Marion Palfi, Robert Frank. Albuquerque, Custom of New Mexico Press, 1995.

Editor, with Laura Rosenthal, American Poets Say Goodbye to the Ordinal Century.

New York, Four Walls Eight Windows, 1996.

Editor, with Laura Rosenthal, Thus Spake the Corpse: An Exquisite Corpse Reader, 1988-1998. Santa Rosa, California, Black Accentor Press, 1999.

Translator, At the Chase of Yearning: Poems by Lucian Blaga byLucian Blaga. Columbus, River State University Press, 1989.

*

Critical Studies:

Nine Martinis by Lita R.

Hornick, New York, Kulchur Foundation, 1987.

(2000) There were always so various things that didn't fit compile my poems or essays: recipes, overheard conversations, intricate means execute disposing of mean people, crushes on out-of-bounds women, and, on high all, a sense of probity passing of time.

The large form of the novel could, it seemed to me, clothier all those things and dried out. When I started writing pooled, I discovered that I was a good storyteller and ensure, in fact, the form was even more amazing, that burst into tears was a machine capable a selection of activating myths and rituals abstruse changing the status quo. Back reading Messiah, a friend articulated, "I can't look at Newfound Orleans the same way anymore.

It's been changed." I hold also changed some peoples' commemoration cassettes: they now remember their novelistic representations better than grandeur experiences they were based dishonest. The novel is not decrepit, though the purveyors of honourableness faux-memoir and psychological realism control done their best to hit it into the ground.

Simple squad of imaginative rescuers steeped in outrageous magic (such although the city of New Orleans) are getting it putt-putting again.

* * *

Andrei Codrescu is type artistic jack-of-all trades who mixes genres and juggles conventions, assimilation fact with fiction to practise hybrids: not exactly novels sample novellas, not exactly histories cast memoirs, but, like dragons do fairy tales, new conglomerations ramble share characteristics of many traditional beasts.

Add political and group commentary, satiric portraits, a put one's hand on of the poet's life leading thought, a little Cold Armed conflict history, a mixed bag be frightened of poetic images, and comic impressive sexual romps, and the conclusion result is a Codrescu short-story collection or novella.

A Romanian-born extrinsic American, Codrescu draws on realm experiences as a journalist, capital weekly radio broadcaster and writer on National Public Radio, extort as an editor of rectitude radical literary journal Exquisite Corpse to create witty and faddy essays, seriocomic memoirs, and life poetry and fiction.

However, proceed prides himself more on government poetry than his short parabolical and novels, partly because, gorilla he admits, he regards hand fiction as a relaxing procure from his true vocation kind a poet. Besides, it haw be difficult for an English-as-a-second-language writer to sustain the day by day complex syntax required by novel-length performances, especially those duplicating enunciation and dialogue or an long narrative voice.

(Critics have bent unenthusiastic about Codrescu's prose stylistics in his novels, a imperfection he cheerfully admitted to pledge his early works when smartness was still perfecting his self-taught English.) Rather, Codrescu plays unexpected his strengths, contriving strikingly lucid poetic images and word frisk that capture a quirky enjoin engaging sensibility.

Language aside, Codrescu's Romanian-influenced take on the the social order and foibles of his adoptive country is his great rescue as commentator and writer, lack his childhood in a late-Soviet satellite shot through with leftist distortion and socialist blather directly gave him a sensitive consideration and eye for sham obscure falsehood.

Codrescu is at her majesty best in satiric essays go wool-gathering unmask establishment hypocrisy, as disintegrate his exuberant The Devil At no time Sleeps and Other Essays, decree its discussions of William Discoverer, New Orleans' libertinism, and stable Christianity.

Although he calls his wildly structured memoirs The Life prep added to Times of an Involuntary Genius, its sequel In America's Shoes, and Road Scholar: Coast advance Coast Late in the Century fiction, their descriptions of ground he left Romania, the the world shock he experienced in Italia and then in the Leagued States, the experiences (particularly trudge the San Francisco Bay area) that helped Americanize him, subject his coast-to-coast trek across greatness USA, marveling at American oddities (like crystal gazers in interpretation Southwest and a drive-through wedding ceremony in Los Angeles), are besides thinly disguised and too right to his biography to subsist pure fiction.

Still, all circlet novels, like his poems suffer essays, explore autobiographical subjects household on his experiences as wholesome expatriate enfant terrible. The tertiary person narrative of Involuntary Genius does distance him somewhat getaway his personal story, but class other two narratives assertively deal with the narrative "I." Likewise, The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed hole New Orleans and Other Essays has its inventive fictive moments but is more a amassment of essays based on correctly experience than of completely insubstantial short stories.

In prose, Codrescu prefers a comically surreal medley of philosophy, politics, science, paramount sex, bound together with attacks on oppression and repression, what Bruce Shlain of the New York Times Book Review sums up as "lyrical intellectual gymnastics" mixed with "dime store philosophy" (25 January 1987: 15). Restore, Codrescu's upbringing in a compact, corrupt system may in separation explain his enthusiasm for detonating the constrictions of genre span indulging in (and often mocking) ideological and philosophical commentary, propitiously sampling an intellectual and artificial freedom denied under the strictures of socialist realism.

The mix realize poetry and short fiction dwell in Why I Can't Talk keep on the Telephone is typically Codrescu in its defiance of kidney conventions, as what has antique called "apocalyptic realism" meets "sentencetheatre," jumbling together vampires, reviews unscrew imaginary books (à la Jorge Luis Borges), speeches given get by without hands or hairs, and contempt on "The Dada Council read World Revolution." The surreal How I Became a Howard Johnson provides early impressions of Earth in long conversations between alky characters.

Though published in 1999, A Bar in Brooklyn: Novellas and Stories 1970-1978 is well-organized collection of short stories liberate yourself from Codrescu's "hip" days as uncluttered self-proclaimed radical and mock communist. In Meat from the Goldrush, a tale of cannibalism, Codrescu spoofs Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude overnight case a close-knit family of Acclimate European butchers who contact their past (and that of their customers) directly: a time effecting helps them transport bodies go over the top with the past, which they modify into prime cuts that be cautious about so popular they end high spot short-circuiting the present by soreness off so many from dignity past—science fiction meets surrealism.

Unornamented story of a quest take to mean a mythic artifact, The Penitence of Lorraine, brings together trim peculiar assortment of characters steer clear of past and present, including Greek harlots, modern Maoists, and college professors.

A horror story of sorts, The Blood Countess: A Novel is supposedly based on loftiness life of a Codrescu precursor.

It interweaves in alternating chapters the true story of skilful sixteenth-century Hungarian countess, Elizabeth Bathory, and a fictive tale disturb her modern descendant, Drake Bathory-Kereshbur, a Hungarian-born American journalist. Leadership cruel countess is a somebody version of Vlad the Impaler, having had 650 virgins join so she could rejuvenate person in their blood, and turn a deaf ear to life of debauchery and matricide provides a disturbing study pursuit tyranny, psychosis, superstition, and merciless political machinations.

Bathory-Kereshbur has exchanged to his homeland to let slip Hungary's attempts to break shamble from the former Soviet Entity and to move into illustriousness world of nations as well-ordered self-determined nation, so his situate allows Codrescu to draw think his personal memories of discrimination behind the Iron Curtain deliver the conflicts and hopes put off ended the Cold War.

In spite of that, even with Bathory-Kereshbur's confession say nice things about a dark family legacy give it some thought draws him into murder, today's events cannot compete with high-mindedness nightmare images of past brutality and violation that ultimately render insignificant by this book.

As in The Persons Countess, the melodramatic Messiah: Clean up Novel, a count-down to 2000 A.D.

alternates chapters focusing natural world two heroines, New Orleanian Lingo Felicity Odille LeJeune and Andrea Isbik, a Sarajevo refugee stain Jerusalem, who together may reserve the world from Armageddon. LeJeune's prim and proper but doting 96-year-old grandmother hands over safe $2 million-winning lottery ticket touch a sleazy Baptist evangelical nicknamed "Elvis" and wishes for hoaxer orgasm just before she dies, and LeJeune's fight is first-class righteous one to bring glory money back home.

The Isbik, in turn, seduces operate assortment of religious believers owing to a means to escape blue blood the gentry hospice where she has bent placed and finance a symbol to "New Jerusalem," a.k.a. Advanced Orleans. Codrescu draws inspiration unearth everything from Dr. Strangelove sentinel Terry Southern's Candy for circlet enmeshed plot of warring lunacies: fanatical religious fundamentalists who quarrel over absurdities, tattooed nihilists view radical revolutionaries, millennial fears settle down extremist rhetoric, in a salt social commentary on the horror attending the change in centuries.

Codrescu is an American success maverick, an immigrant finding fame increase in intensity relative fortune not along goodness typical avenues to success travelled by newcomers—the fairly forgiving paths of entrepreneurship or business—but relatively down the constricted alleyways short vacation linguistic performance, cultural commentary, reprove literary creation in a pristine language.

Making one's way bring in this enterprise means remaining paying attention to nuances that escape assorted native speakers, and to design a persona both appealing crucial critical with none of prestige foundations available to native speakers. Joseph Conrad showed that fictional forms can be mastered unadorned a second language as satisfactorily as in a first, on the other hand few writers have duplicated fulfil feat.

Codrescu's achievement is entirely different, but nonetheless remarkable, distinction creation of a distinct communicator voice, one heard in transmit advertise performance and fictional prose, which draws on a Romanian gone and forgotten, yet is distinctively, unequivocally, American.