Andrei Codrescu's collections of essays include "The Devil Never Sleeps" (2000) and "The Dog with the Chip in His Neck: Essays from NPR (National Public Radio) and Elsewhere" (1996).
He has also written "Hail Babylon! In Search of the American City at the End of the Millennium" (1998), in which he writes about what he found during his travels through New York, Baltimore, New Orleans (now his home), Little Rock, San Antonio, Albuquerque, Las Vegas and Portland.
"With the exception of Salt Lake City, no American city can claim to have been founded by divine revelation," he wrote in "Hail Babylon!"
Codrescu is also a poet, and he wrote and published his first poems in Romania at the age of 16. He now writes everything in English, such as "Comrade Past and Present" (1991), "Belligerence" (1993) and "Alien Candor: Selected Poems, 1970-1995 (1996).
In 1989, Codrescu returned to Romania to cover the collapse of communism for NPR and ABC's "Nightline." The book describing those experiences is "The Hole in the Flag."
He is probably most famous for his monthly satirical commentaries on NPR, which he delivers in a sardonic, thick accent on NPR's "All Things Considered" broadcast during afternoon drive time. He has also made several national TV appearances on "The Today Show," "The Late Show with David Letterman," "The Charlie Rose Show" and CNN's "International Hour."
His essays have appeared in The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, Playboy Magazine and The New York Times, and he edits the periodical, "Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Letters and Life."
But Codrescu is also well-known for a Peabody Award-winning film, "Road Scholar." "I drove a 1967 Cadillac convertible around America," he said, "looking for Americans who live outside the mainstream."