The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin Play Chess (Public Square) Paperback – February 22, 2009

This Zagat-sized handbook, a Dadaist chop suey showcasing the astonishing intellectual range of English professor and NPR commentator Codrescu (New Orleans, Mon Amour), is arranged alphabetically and topically, which permits one to dip in or to read it all. The occasionally outrageous encyclopedic juxtapositions of entries give a firsthand experience similar to the effect of Dada cutups and collages. The human and so-called posthuman are concepts best understood via Codrescu's imagined 1916 game of chess in Zurich between Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada (the art of the absurd), and Vladimir Ilych Lenin, avatar of the anti-Dada ethos of communism. Exactly how this fictitious game, played on the metaphoric chessboard of history—with the author rooting for Tzara —informs the rest of this book is murky. Yet, wending and blending their way through it all are dozens of people and subjects, among them Ben Franklin (who, like Lenin, bristles at the royalist aspects of chess) and a Belgian eccentric named Paul Otlet (who more or less envisioned the World Wide Web in the 1930s) and much else, japing and serious. (Apr.)
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One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers. (New York Times Book Review)

Can't decide whether to cry or laugh? Laugh at absurdity, laugh at hardship, laugh at poverty, says Andrei Codrescu in his maddening, enlightening, self-contradictory, highly amusing new book. . . . [Codrescu] has rolled into one slim guide a postmodern self-help manual, a history lesson, a love letter to dissident poets, a hard jab at communism and a veiled autobiography. . . . The guide is, beneath it all, a mournful celebration of the achievements of pre-communist Romanian Jews, such as Tzara and modernist painter and architect (and Dadaist) Marcel Janco.---Carly Berwick, Los Angeles Times

Any reader looking for a quirky, polemical, provocative introduction to Dada might like to try Andrei Codrescu's Posthuman Dada Guide, in which the author's key terms are alphabetically listed and 'hermeneutically filleted'. His linguistic glee also means that this dictionary can easily be read cover to cover.---Peter Read, Times Literary Supplement

This Zagat-sized handbook, a Dadaist chop suey showcasing the astonishing intellectual range of English professor and NPR commentator Codrescu, is arranged alphabetically and topically, which permits one to dip in or to read it all. The occasionally outrageous encyclopedic juxtapositions of entries give a firsthand experience similar to the effect of Dada cutups and collages. (Publishers Weekly)

A hard-edged, rapier-like volume, perfect for sliding into a back pocket of skinny hipster pants or stabbing into the complacent underbelly of bourgeois (or bourgeois-bohemian) society. It offers a headier-than-usual tour of the early-1900s avant-garde, sprinkled with sex appeal for the would-be MySpace-age revolutionary. . . . As art theory, the Guide could even be preferable to a college seminar on modernism. . . . [Codrescu] also places Dada on a broader historical stage than it usually receives, mingling it with world politics.---Eli Epstein-Deutsch, Village Voice

Even for professional provocateur Andrei Codrescu, he of the playful intelligence and sardonic wit, this new book is quite something. It's out there--a chronicle of an imagined chess game between V.I. Lenin and Tristan Tzara, the founder of Dada, set in the cafe culture of Zurich, Switzerland, in 1916, amid the ferment of bohemianism and revolution. It's a scholarly work, with extensive footnotes; it's a work of imagination; it's a guidebook to a strange new era. It's a call to remember humanity in a post-human time, and an incitement. To read it is to light a mental fuse.---Susan Larson, New Orleans Times-Picayune

A profoundly provocative look at dada. . . . If you're vaguely familiar with Codrescu's NPR essays or other writings, than you already know that this is a book laced with wit and humor. He makes an erudite topic easy--and pleasurable--to follow.---Robert L. Pincus, San Diego Union Tribune

A dictionary, a history of art movements, a manifesto, and a joke book; [The Posthuman Dada Guide] traverses high and low, seeking answers to our most persistent confusions about art, culture, and identity. . . . By the end, the reader has come to grips with Codrescu's stoic, but darkly hopeful, vision for a future that is no future at all.---D. Scot Miller, San Francisco Bay Guardian

Codrescu's analysis of the chess game is written with attitude--itself a Dada-like performance--balancing critique with reinvention, aiming to reveal Dada's place in 'posthuman' life. This guide is true to its title, fitting comfortably in a pocket, ready to be deployed at the slightest provocation.---Alan Lucey, Bookforum

Erudite, witty, often demented, Codrescu's book is an excellent introduction to the matter and spirit of dada.---Justin Clemens, The Australian