The Devil Never Sleeps: and Other Essays

Codrescu, Andrei

ISBN 10: 0312202946 / ISBN 13: 9780312202941

Published by St. Martin's Press, 2000

About this Item

Hardcover first edition in very good condition with a mylar wrapped dust jacket.

Seller Inventory # 946

Bibliographic Details

• Title: The Devil Never Sleeps: and Other Essays
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Publication Date: 2000
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0312202946
• ISBN 13: 9780312202941
• Binding: Hard Cover
• Edition: 1st.
• Condition: Very Good
• Dust Jacket Condition: Very Good
• Dimensions: 2.68W x 16.1H x 24.38D centimeters 2.68 centimeters width by 16.1 centimeters height by 24.38 centimeters depth
• Weight: 521.631 grams

About this title

Synopsis

The Devil is alive and well and living in America, Andrei Codrescu tells us, and with good reason. Nowhere else in the world--not even in Codrescu's native Transylvania--is he taken quite as seriously. When Codrescu gently derided the fundamentalist Christian belief in Rapture ("a pre-apocalyptic event during which all true believers would be suctioned off to heaven in a single woosh") in one of his commentaries on National Public, NPR received forty thousand letters in a protest spearheaded by Ralph Reed of the Christian Coalition. Codrescu was warned to "stay away from eschatology."

Thankfully for us, he hasn't. In The Devil Never Sleeps, one of America's shrewdest social critics sets out to uncover the Devil's most modern and insidiously banal incarnations. Once easily recognizable by his horns, tail, and propensity for plague, today's Devil has become embedded in every fiber of our culture. Discussing everything from rock 'n' roll to William Burroughs to New Orleans bars to the Demon of Prosperity, Codrescu mockingly unmasks Old Nick as the opportunistic technocrat he really is. Embracing cell phones, cable access, and cyberspace, the ubiquitous Devil of secular culture embodies the true evil facing us today--banality.

In a world teeming with distractions, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil (perhaps they are one and the same), we've become as twenty-four-hour society, swinging desperately between tedium and terror and sleeping fitfully, if at all. As Codrescu points out, the Devil never sleeps because we just won't let him.

With his characteristic charm and playful exuberance, Andrei Codrescu has successfully teased the Devil out from the darkest recesses and comic excesses of the human experience. The Devil Never Sleeps is his most wonderfully perverse book yet.

About the Author

Andrei Codrescu has been on NPR's "All Things Considered" for more than ten years. A professor of literature at Louisiana State University, he lives, naturally, in New Orleans, where he is also the editor of the on-line literary journal, Exquisitecorpse.org.