The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara & Lenin Play Chess

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 A delicious book... A fascinating mix of history, common and obscure ... rigorously intellectual without being stuffy or dogmatic, serious without being solemn and ... obviously and sneakily playful at the same time. -- Michel Basilieres Toronto Star Peppered with warnings not to make Dada a guide for living, the Guide makes it all the more alluring. Readers of this book acquire a delicious complicity with Dada. I can't stop intoning it. Dada dada dada dada. This is a subversive book. -- Helen Scully ArtVoices Magazine Ever want to run naked across a convention floor, pie-hit a bishop, or show up at a job interview in a firecracker hat, screaming poetry until security guards haul you away? Andrei Codrescu's The Posthuman Dada Guide may not be the literal how-to that the title implies, but it will definitely give you the historical and philosophical basis you need to justify a stunt to your cell mates while the authorities figure out what to do with you... Fascinating and indispensible. -- John-Ivan Palmer Rain Taxi Review of Books He's all over the place, and no place in particular--almost the perfect definition of Dada. Best read as a poem pretending to be prose (both Tzara and Lenin were pseudonyms, after all), The Posthuman Dada Guide gives a barbaric yawp in the best tradition of Walt Whitman--and, in its own peculiar way, it's just as American. -- Ben Steelman Star News A roller-coaster ride of essay(s) and grab-bag of ideas, history, and recollections, The Posthuman Dada Guide is an appropriately loose and shifting piece. It is informative and entertaining. -- M. A. Orthofer Complete Review The chess game (both fictitious and ongoing) puts politic and parody at one and at war. The scene is a fast flashing, nonlinear montage taking us in, through and out of the 20th century and delivering us into the 21st, spinning... It is recommended that you carry this guide with you at all times. Consider reading it aloud in the most public of places... The perfect prescription against the posthuman condition--that place where our senses are all too well rehearsed and clearly limiting. -- Katherine Anders Baton Rouge Advocate [A] literary event, a spectacular splash of intelligence and erudition, of clean style and magical impressionability. -- Nicholas Catanoy World Literature Today