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.

"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.