Andrei Codrescu proves a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life.

Ever wondered where that demonic voice on NPR comes from? In these memoirs, Codrescu recalls his life with irrepressible and uncensored candor. From the bitter-sweet delights of a fantastic childhood in the ruins of a Transylvanian castle to the horror and ecstasy of re-inventing himself as an American in a new language, this Proustian romp brims with erotic delight and language at high heat. In an age rife with "memoirs" set on grinding dull axes, Codrescu's razersharp language is both pitiless and unsparing of his experience.

"In our brave new world, techno-evolution is often decried as the death knell of the written word. Award-winning author Andrei Codrescu demolishes this doomsday provocation in Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes). Our moment of bibliodeath marks a tectonic shift under the ocean of human consciousness and the written word. As words migrate from the book into other means of transport, we are "privy to ... the passage of the soul from one body into another, a reincarnation that is not a meta-physics." A suspenseful meditation planted in a bed of alluring stories-cum-footnotes, Codrescu wades into the bibliodeath waters to examine his own evolution as a writer. From the poetic lines of an unlined notebook in 1960s Romania to the founding of Exquisite Corpse in 1983 to his ongoing commentary on NPR's All Things Considered, his journey is an archive of reinvention. Codrescu's literal Archives and his unsentimental and savage faith in reinvention take in the history of the literate world, the transformation of the printed word, and language itself. This picaresque adventure of a mind at work spans the fin-de-siécle to the 21st century, as the bibliodeath of one medium meets the birth of the next. The evolution of technology must deal with the indomitable bond between language and the human being. In the story of Codrescu, "leaving the traces of one's passage is worth the labor of a lifetime."--Back cover.

Book by Codrescu, Andrei