"The Posthuman Dada Guide is an impractical handbook for practical living in our posthuman world - all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism. This epic game at Zurich's Cafe de la Terrasse - a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution - lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth- and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada - and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultraconnected present and future. Here dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich. The Posthuman Dada Guide is arranged alphabetically for quick reference and (some) nostalgia for order, with entries such as "eros (women)," "internet(s)," and "war." Throughout, it is written in the belief "that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources."

Trenchant, occasionally splenetic, and always brutally funny, Romanian-born Codrescu confronts the convulsions of our post-ideological world at a time when "the advent of cyberspace and the caffeinating of America has occurred simultaneously." With these newest essays from 1994 and 1995 - some that are straight off the NPR airwaves and some that have served as magazine pieces or speeches - Codrescu takes us on a roller-coaster tour through our own dramatically changing country. Making stops along the way to observe the shifting American landscape, our incisive guide confronts, among other curiosities: the ever-increasing illusion of democracy; the Internet and sex in the cyber age; the rise and rerise of the religious Right; the grotesquerie born out of the cooling shards of post-Communism; the transformation of the American palate; the ascendance of vampirism; and the new millennial contagion. Andrei Codrescu has been keeping his audience abreast of the absurdities of American culture for over ten years, and his trademark irony, buoyant paranoia, and mystical cynicism are once again in ample evidence in this collection. Along for the ride are all of his familiar characters, including puppets, fascists, airplanes, and Greyhound buses, but now his menagerie has expanded to include one electronically adjusted dog, Miss America, and an alligator god.