LITERATURE + LECTURES

The Menil Collection presents a Reading and Booksigning: Andrei Codrescu, The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess.

Monday, March 30, 2009, 7 p.m.
Reading: The Menil Collection foyer
Booksigning: Menil Collection Bookstore

Andrei Codrescu (pictured) (www.codrescu.com ) has been a commentator on All Things Considered since 1983. He is an homme-de-lettres whose novels, essays and poetry have been infiltrating the American psyche since he emigrated from his native Romania to Detroit in 1965. He is the author of forty books of poetry, fiction, and essays, and the founder of Exquisite Corpse.

He has received a Peabody award for the PBS version of his film Road Scholar, and has reported for NPR and ABC News from Romania (1989) and Cuba (1996). His new books are The Posthuman Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Princeton University Press, 2009) and Jealous Witness: New Poems (Coffee House Press), with a CD of Storm Songs by The New Orleans Klezmer All-Stars. Andrei lives in New Orleans and the Ozarks.

The newest book by the Romanian-born American poet, novelist, essayist, screenwriter, and NPR commentator, is printed to resemble a travel guide, and imagined as a game of chess. Pitting Tzara against Lenin in a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution, Codrescu offers a meditation on absolute ideals turned into alibis for tyranny.