Andrei Codrescu

October 15, 2013 • By Jean Harris, Costica Bradatan, Marjorie Perloff

Photo by Eduard Koller

ANDREI CODRESCU retired from Louisiana State University in 2009. Since then he has published a book every year and has been more active than ever; rarely has retirement been more rejuvenating. Codrescu is now taking a fresh look at old topics and bringing new life into some of his literary obsessions. He is also taking a keen interest in philosophy and religion and, in general, is toying with immortality. Los Angeles Review of Books is pleased to share some of Andrei Codrescu’s latest writing. We’ve also invited Marjorie Perloff to review his most recent poetry collection and Jean Harris to interview him.

— Costica Bradatan

reviews Codrescu's latest collection

So Recently Rent a World

INTERVIEW

with Codrescu

by JEAN HARRI S

Jean Harris

Jean Harris is a novelist, translator and essayist now living in Bucharest, Romania. She has been the 2007-2008 winner of the University of California, Irvine’s International Center for Writing and Translation’s translation grant for her translation of Ştefan Bănulescu’s “Mistreţii erau blazi.” Director of The Observer Translation Project 2008-2009, she has been guest editor of Absinthe 13: Spotlight on Romania (2010). Her translations have appeared, among other places, in The Guardian, Habitus: a Diaspora Journal (2012), and Jewish Fiction.net . Harris holds a Ph.D. in British and American literature from Rutgers University.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Costica Bradatan

Costica Bradatan is a professor of humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University in the United States and an honorary research professor of philosophy at University of Queensland in Australia. He is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers (Bloomsbury, paperback, 2018) and In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility (Harvard University Press, 2023). His work has been translated into more than 20 languages, including Dutch, Italian, Turkish, Chinese, Vietnamese, Arabic, and Farsi. Bradatan also writes book reviews, essays, and op-ed pieces for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Times Literary Supplement, Aeon, The New Statesman, and other similar venues.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR

Marjorie Perloff

Marjorie Perloff is the author of many books on modern and contemporary poetry and poetics, including The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage, The Futurist Moment, Wittgenstein's Ladder, and, most recently, Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Her memoir The Vienna Paradox was published in 2004. She is Professor Emerita of English at Stanford University.

LARB CONTRIBUTOR