Book - Anthologies

The Exquisite Corpuscle

by Frank Wu & Jay Lake, editors

Price:	$20.00 USD
S&H:	USA $2.00, Can./Mex. $4.00, Elsehwere $9.00
Availability:
Details:	Trade, 216 pgs., ISBN 978-0-9789078-8-4, Released 10/1/2008, Art by Matt Taggart

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

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

Editorial Reviews

Publisher's Weekly

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."

Cover Comments

The Exquisite Corpuscle is an exquisite adventure through the imagination of some of the best writers and artists in speculative fiction today. An exercise full of surprising moments of beauty and clarity, a delightful riff on some of our many possible futures. Drop in for a grand experiment of blending; art and prose, poetry and play, science and magic.

—	Brenda Cooper, author of Reading the Wind

A grand and interstitial experiment in group creativity, voice and the joy of weaving words and images into Story.

—	Ken Scholes, author of Lamentation

The Exquisite Corpuscle is an unusual book in that it resembles an anthology, but only on the surface. The stories, poems, and art within its pages aren’t united by theme, or form, or genre, but by a device —a creative game. Editors Jay Lake and Frank Wu have assembled a remarkable collection of creative minds and turned them loose: imaginations unfettered with the sole objective of creating interesting work while having a good time. And we, the readers, are rewarded with the end result: a remarkable book that was created for the best of reasons — the love of the game.

—	James Owen, author of Here, There Be Dragons

The province of imagination is curiosity and fascination. Such is the stuff of The Exquisite Corpuscle, taking us to strange dream-like places, which, in the end, are but metaphors for the truly strange world in which we live.

—	Bruce Taylor, author of The Final Trick of Funnyman