The Muse Is Always Half-Dressed in New Orleans: and Other Essays
by Andrei Codrescu
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"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 show more 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."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved show lessTags
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Read this before my first trip to New Orleans, and learned more about my Romanian friend than the city in America. Codrescu shows the world a face for Romania, one once hidden behind the mask of Dracula, both the Count and Communism.
Pretty good, though I've never gone back to it the way I have to, say, James Lileks or Michael Kelly.
We sold our house! We are house hunting! We are moving! Soon! So, I'm releasing all BookCrossing books that I stumble upon so we don't have to pack/move/unpack them in whatever we find. We're downsizing, so the book collection gets thinned again.
Hopefully, I'll be able to find another copy of this book sometime.
Hopefully, I'll be able to find another copy of this book sometime.
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Romanian-born poet and essayist Andrei Codrescu, who also utilizes the pen names Betty Laredo and Maria Parfeni, emigrated to the United States in 1966. Codrescu earned a B.A. at the University of Bucharest, and has taught at numerous academic institutions including Johns Hopkins, the University of Baltimore, and Louisiana State University. show more Codrescu worked for National Public Radio as a commentator and has been featured on ABC News' Nightline. Some of Codrescu's short stories and novels include his first poetry collection, License to Carry a Gun and a memoir entitled In America's Shoe. Throughout the years, Codrescu has been awarded many honors including the Big Table Poetry Award, General Electric Foundation Poetry Prize, and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowships for poetry, editing, and radio. His titles include The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess, The Poetry Lesson, and Whatever Gets You through the Night: A Story of Sheherezade and the Arabian Entertainments. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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- Reviews
- 4
- Rating
- (3.61)
- Languages
- English
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- Paper, Ebook
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- 3
