Andrei Codrescu

Softcover, 364 pages ISBN: 1-57423-159-6 2001 $18.95 Hardcover, 364 pages ISBN: 1-57423-160-x $32.95 An Involuntary Genius in America’s Shoes (And What Happened Afterwards) the autobiography of Andrei Codrescu "The Algeresque story of how Andrei Perlmutter, a bright kid growing up in the Stalinist backwater of 1950s Romania, manages to vault himself into the heart of ’60s American counterculture as Andrei Codrescu, Transylvanian exotic and man of letters. . . . [Written] with enormous verve . . . it is not only a self-portrait of the future poet, travel writer, NPR broadcaster and novelist but a thumbnail history of recent American literary bohemia." —Publishers Weekly 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.” Softcover, 224 pages ISBN: 1-57423-097-2 1999 $17.95 Hardcover, 224 pages ISBN: 1-57423-098-0 $26.95 A Bar in Brooklyn novellas & stories by Andrei Codrescu “These experimental tales (four novellas and seven very short stories) explore in one way or another what it means to be an American. . . . Cheeky and challenging, with a flashy, playful wit [and] a madcap sense of the absurd.” —Publishers Weekly Before turning to the novel, Andrei Codrescu published experimental, improvisational short fiction in The Paris Review, the New Directions annual, and little magazines. Here is the author’s choice of his best novellas and stories—eleven freewheeling forays into American hyperreality, the female psyche, and the mystery of polymorphic sexual magic.   "A Bar in Brooklyn shows a restless imagination wrestling with, and liberated by, America and the English language. The results are surrealistic and occasionally masterly." —The New York Times Book Review Vol. 1: Softcover, 420 pages ISBN: 1-57423-100-6 1988 $18.95 Vol. 2: Softcover, 488 pages ISBN: 1-57423-141-3 1988 $18.95 Thus Spake the Corpse An Exquisite Corpse Reader 1988–1998 edited by Andrei Codrescu & Laura Rosenthal 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, pissed some people off, 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?’ ” Volume 1: Poetry & Essays 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 Sur(region)alist 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. Volume 2: Fictions, Travels & Translations Highlights: “Lives of the Poets,” including Pete Seeger on Charles Olson; Jan Kerouac on her father, Jack; John Kehoe on Charles Bukowski; Keith Abbott on Ted Berrigan; Edward Field on Alfred Chester; and (notoriously) Mark Spitzer on Ed Dorn. Fiction by Maxine Chernoff, Maggie Dubris, Barry Gifford, Eric Kraft, and twenty-three others. Travel notes (very loosely construed) by Hakim Bey, Andrei Codrescu, Pat Nolan, and Anne Waldman, And translations of Boris Vian by Julia Older, of Vladimir Pistalo by Charles Simic, of Attila Jozsef by John Batki, and of the Romanian poets of the 60’s generation by several accomplished hands. Visit Cybercorpse, the Exquisite Corpse’s web successor, at www.corpse.org