THE EXQUISITE CORPUSCLE

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FRANK WU and JAY LAKE, editors

October 2008      978-0-9789078-8-4

Cover art by Matt Taggart

The interior of this imaginative collection is presented in full color.


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The game we’re playing tonight is called "The Exquisite Corpuscle," a variant of a parlor game played by Salvador Dali and the other Surrealists. In the original game, each participant would think of a word, then they would string all of them together. The first known resulting phrase "The exquisite corpse," gave the game its name. In the game we’re playing here, we start with the phrase "The Exquisite Corpuscle." The first entry is a painting by co-editor Frank Wu. Frank hands off the painting to the next person, who writes a story, then it gets passed on (without the painting) to the next person, who then writes a poem. Each person works in a different medium than the person before. Three separate chains work their way to a point until co-editor Jay Lake writes a single unifying story. A last art piece brings the game to a close.

Featuring: Kenneth Brady, Alan DeNiro, Richard Doyle, Michaela Eaves, M.C.A. Hogarth, Michael J. Jasper, Jay Lake, Aurora Lemieux, Kristin Livdahl, Mary Anne Mohanraj, Tim Pratt, Bruce Holland Rogers, Benjamin Rosenbaum, Nigel Sade, Maia Sanders, Heather Shaw, Diana Sherman, Gary W. Shockley, Christina Sng, Matt Taggart, Greg van Eekhout, & Frank Wu

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​"Starting with a painting by Hugo-winning artist Wu, 22 writers, artists and poets take turns spinning ideas off of a previous contributor's work. The three 'chains,' which include such varied ideas as a pagoda full of adversarial Raquel Welches and a sorcerer who unknowingly creates a man out of a plum pit, are eventually (and unsatisfactorily) tied together with a story by editor Lake (Escapement) and artwork by Matt Taggart. Some pieces stand alone easily: Benjamin Rosenbaum's brilliant 'Start the Clock' is set in a near future where a virus has trapped some people in prepubescent bodies, and Heather Shaw's 'Elements' follows four adventurous college students who participate in a nature ritual that goes awry. Fans of surrealism and innovative speculative fiction will appreciate this fascinating and ambitious exploration of the 'groupmind.'"   
     --Publishers Weekly