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"Andrei Codrescu is a startlingly original explainer of places who manages to be as entertaining as he is perceptive."
- John Berendt, author of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil

"One of our most prodigiously talented and magical writers."
- Bruce Shlain, The New York Times Book Review

"'Commentary' does not begin to describe the alternately sardonic and stunned, weary and wondering observations about modern life that Codrescu has delivered."
- Boston Herald

"Codrescu has a novelist's prowess for narrative tension, a sensualist's attention to detail, and a humanist's knack for empathy."
- Time Out, New York

"Codrescu has rightfully assumed his place among the keener chroniclers of the American spirit, 1990s-style."
- The New York Times

THE DEVIL NEVER SLEEPS
AND OTHER ESSAYS
(St. Martin's Press, 2000)

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 whoosh") in one of his commentaries on National Public Radio, 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 distraction, we are still more than capable of being bored to death. Tormented as much by insomnia and its ravages as the Devil (perhaps they're one and the same), we've become a 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 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.