The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world--not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania--is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ("a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single woosh") in one of his commentaries on National Public, NPR received forty thousand letters in a protest spearheaded by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Codrescu was warned to "stay away from eschatology." Thankfully for us, he hasn't. In The Devil Never Sleeps, one of America's shrewdest social critics sets out to uncover the Devil's most modern and insidiously banal incarnations. Once easily recognizable by his horns, tail, and propensity for plague, today's Devil has become embedded in every fiber of our culture. Discussing everything from rock 'n' roll to William Burroughs to New Orleans bars to the Demon of Prosperity, Codrescu mockingly unmasks Old Nick as the opportunistic technocrat he really is. Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today--banality. In a world teeming with distractions, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil (perhaps they are one and the same), we've become as twenty-four-hour society, swinging desperately between tedium and terror and sleeping fitfully, if at all. As Codrescu points out, the Devil never sleeps because we just won't let him. With his characteristic charm and playful exuberance, Andrei Codrescu has successfully teased the Devil out from the darkest recesses and comic excesses of the human experience. The Devil Never Sleeps is his most wonderfully perverse book yet.

The Devil Never Sleeps

Literature & Fiction

Andrei Codrescu

Essays & Correspondence

St.Martin's Press

Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and journalist,  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 descendent, a contemporary journalist who  must return to his native Hungary and come to  terms with his bloody and disturbing  past.Drake Bathory-Kereshtur, 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 horror--of the  Hungarian aristocracy. As a descendent 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.

Blood Countess Hb

Quartet Books Ltd.

This work forms part of the tenth-anniversary celebrations of the University of Glamorgan. It traces the institution's development from its beginnings as the South Wales and Monmouthshire School of Mines to its present-day status as a university and sets that history in the context of the university's environment.

The Blood Countess

Contemporary

Quartet Books

Book by Andrei Codrescu, D.H. Lawrence, James Laughlin, Allen Ginsberg, Barry Gifford, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ezra Pound

Ends and Beginnings (City Lights Review, No. 6)

Allen GINSBERG

Barry Gifford

Pier Paolo Pasolini

Ezra, Pound

James Laughlin

D.H.Lawrence

United States

CITY LIGHTS

Walker Evans photographed signs throughout every phase of his career. From the 1920s to the time of his death in 1975, Evans was obsessed with the signage he found in modern America--from billboards to gas station pumps to street graffiti to handmade announcements of a Saturday-night dance. This book features fifth photographs of signs from the Getty Museum's collection, presented with a lively, provocative essay by Andrei Codrescu. Codrescu trains a perceptive eye on the artistic and social climate in Evans's America and reflects on the photographer's images as documents and commentary. Some of the images included come from the place and era most closely associated with Evans--the rural South of the 1930s. But also included are photographs that will be less familiar to many of his admirers, such as his images of New York City street scenes and advertising signs, or pictures he took in Havana and in Sarasota, Florida.

Walker Evans: Signs (Getty Trust Publications: J. Paul Getty Museum)

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

J.paul Getty Museum

Belligerence

Poetry

Coffee House Press

The new edition of the bestselling alternative anthology of American poets isa 600-page gathering of what is alive, awake, and intelligent on the current poetry scene. This edition includes a complete index and more than 400 poems.

American poetry since 1970: Up late

Four Walls, Eight Windows

This is the second edition of DISKO, Andrew Miksys' acclaimed book of photographs of Lithuanian village discos. These photographs have been featured in many magazines and online including VICE, BUZZFEED, and DAZED &amp; CONFUSED. The second edition has a new silver glitter cover and is smaller in format. It also contains two extra photographs and a text in Lithuanian and English. "The discos of Lithuania were once Soviet offices, detention centers, weapons storage, rare Lithuanian mushroom-packing plants... who knows? One can dream of their former incarnations and feel that, no matter how grim, they are being violently shoved into history by the hungry young bodies Andrew photographs. These fashionably thin embodiments are literally the heirs of hunger. Poured into Western jeans and poses, they look like bewildered time-travelers who emerged in these shifting prisons to liberate them for dance. Andrew's photographs capture a generation born to bewilderment: the disko kids still carry the past in their eyes and hard-to-maintain indifference, but they are the creatures of a very brief moment in time, one that will never ever exist again except in these pictures. Miksys has caught a fleeting world that emanates death and hope in the pulses of ephemeral disco lights." - ANDREI CODRESCU For ten years Andrew Miksys traveled the back roads of Lithuania photographing teenagers in village discos. Most of these discos are located in Soviet-era culture houses where Miksys would sometimes find discarded Lenin paintings, old Soviet movie posters, gas masks, and other remnants of the Soviet Union. He became fascinated by all this debris of a dead empire and the teenagers who visited the clubs. It seemed like a perfect backdrop to make a series of photographs about young people in Lithuania, a crumbling past, and the uncertain future of a new generation all together in one room.

Disko

Andrew Miksys

ARÖK

The whole story of a difficult love, from the first signs of tenderness through a life-and-death battle, to a reconciliation made necessary by wisdom. An affair conducted from a great distance through literature and technology. This long sequence story poem was written via email by Andrei Codrescu and Ruxandra Cesereanu. Its original publication in Romanian last year resulted in critical acclaim and recognitions throughout Eastern Europe. This is its first appearance in English.

Forgiven Submarine

Ruxandra, Cesereanu

Commonwealth Books, Black Widow

In this collection of new short fiction, eight contemporary authors take aim against the hyperbole of the death of print by exploring just how far writers and artists will go to promote themselves in an evolving world where the laws of decorum no longer apply. Prophetic, harrowing, and at times laugh-out-loud humorous, these stories walk the fine line between fiction and fact, art and apocalypse, to chronicle a trend that cannot be ignored. The book includes a long-lost story by Terry Southern.

A Brief History of Authoterrorism

David Rees

Terry Southern

Ben Greenman

Mark Jay Mirsky

Nile Southern

Jeffrey Dorchen

Whitney Anne Trettien

Literary

ANTIBOOKCLUB

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Books by Andrei Codrescu