Paperback, 248 pages, Princeton University Press (March 2009), ISBN: 9780691137780. RRP: £11.95

‘The Posthuman Dada Guide’ warns its readers that it “is a guide for instructing posthumans in living a Dada life. It is not advisable, nor was it ever, to lead a Dada life”. The book is an impractical handbook for practical living – all by way of examining the imagined 1916 chess game between Tristan Tzara, the daddy of Dada, and V. I. Lenin, the daddy of communism.

This epic game at Zurich’s Cafe de la Terrasse – a battle between radical visions of art and ideological revolution – lasted for a century and may still be going on, although communism appears dead and Dada stronger than ever. As the poet faces the future mass murderer over the chessboard, neither realizes that they are playing for the world. Taking the match as metaphor for two poles of twentieth and twenty-first-century thought, politics, and life, Andrei Codrescu has created his own brilliantly Dadaesque guide to Dada, and to what it can teach us about surviving our ultra-connected present and future. Here Dadaists Duchamp, Ball, and von Freytag-Loringhoven, and communists Trotsky, Radek, and Zinoviev appear live in company with later incarnations, including William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Gilles Deleuze, and Newt Gingrich.

Throughout, it is written in the belief “that posthumans lining the road to the future (which looks as if it exists, after all, even though Dada is against it) need the solace offered by the primal raw energy of Dada and its inhuman sources”.

‘The Posthuman Dada Guide: Tzara and Lenin play Chess’ is available in selected bookshops or online from Amazon.co.uk and Waterstones.com.