Alfred Chester

Softcover, 288 pages ISBN 1-57423-206-1 $17.95 Please note that Jamie Is My Heart's Desire will not be available until October 2005. Jamie Is My Heart’s Desire a novel by Alfred Chester Alfred Chester’s masterpiece, The Exquisite Corpse, was among the literary sensations of the 1960s, a surrealistic, homoerotic phantasmagoria that became a cult classic. It was preceded by this, his only other novel, a work more straitlaced in literary form but just as uncompromising and original in content. It tells the story of a cynical Brooklyn undertaker, Harry, and of the object of his affection, a beautiful and deceased young man named Jamie. But does Jamie really exist, or is he merely Harry’s fantasy, the necessary fantasy that makes his life endurable? Harry’s friends – priests, and social workers, psychics and funeral directors – are divided on this matter, and Chester leaves it to the reader to decide. We are proud to republish this upside-down take on the transforming powers of love, which has been out-of-print since the late 1950s. "Alfred Chester is an exciting talent: original, fearless, and very capable." —V.S. Pritchett   Softcover, 228 pages ISBN: 1-57423-197-9 2003, $16.95 The Exquisite Corpse a novel by Alfred Chester with a memoir of the author by Diana Athill "The Exquisite Corpse is a game of "let’s pretend" with God and sex, birth and death, parents and lovers as its stakes, a game that broadens and burgeons till it opens out in every direction, an imaginary toad with an infinity of real gardens in it." —The Village Voice Lyric and tender one moment, cruel and dizzying the next, The Exquisite Corpse neither celebrates perversity nor laments it; rather it projects it as part of man’s never-ending search for a true self and for transcendent communion with others. In forty-nine brief, highly cinematic chapters, we meet a series of twisted but sincere searches––Tomtom Jim and his naked, hungry family; Mary Poorpoor and her utterly “otherly” baby; angry John Doe and his sex slave, James Madison––each in flight from despair. As one surreal episode morphs into the next, these searchers change shape and their journeys change direction; names and identities come and go, storylines collide, and desires intertwine, all with the lightning-quick illogic of a dream. The result is a tragicomic tour de force, an upside-down roadmap to everyone’s inner Sodom, a perversely moral (and morally perverse) masterpiece by a modern-day Marquis de Sade. “Chester is out to shock, to dazzle, to shake up, to offend, but at the same time he is seriously striving to record the implications of obsession, to document the tyranny and anguish of compulsive fantasy . . . Like Henry Miller and William S. Burroughs, he is a born writer with a zestful imagination and a poet’s gift for provocative images.” ––The New York Times Book Review Softcover, 264 pages 0-87685-872-8 1992 $15.95 Looking for Genet: Essays & Reviews by Alfred Chester edited, with a foreword by Edward Field “The minute that Alfred Chester turned from fiction to criticism,” writes Edward Field in his foreword to this collection of Chester’s occasional prose, “editors started pursuing him.” As a writer of experimental fiction, he could not place his stories, “but as a critic, he was a hot number on the scene.” Throughout the 1960s, he published ruthless, devastating, endlessly-talked-about reviews of his elders and contemporaries in the leading intellectual magazines of the day, including Partisan Review, The New York Review of Books, Commentary, and The Paris Review. Like Dale Peck and James Wolcott today, and like Poe and Twain before him, Chester turned literary criticism into a blood sport and a high entertainment. Looking for Genet brings together twenty-five of Chester’s notorious essays and reviews, including pieces on Nabokov’s Pale Fire (“a total wreck, and for one reason: it’s not funny, and it’s supposed to be”), Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (“the first half is pleasantly readable without too much skipping, the second is pleasantly skippable without too much yawning”), and Updike’s Pigeon Feathers (“a god who has allowed a writer to lavish such craft upon these worthless tales is capable of anything”). Here too are sketches from his penniless bohemian life in Paris, seven “Letters from Morocco” written for the New York Herald Tribune, and Chester’s final piece -- the half-mad, previously unpublished “Letter from the Wandering Jew,” a howl of rage and despair from his hated final home, Jerusalem. Together these pieces are testament to the life and the talent of the Sixties’ most memorable literary iconoclasts. “Chester was a glorious writer, tough as nails, with an exquisite ear for the false note. His review of John Rechy’s City of Night is murderously funny, absolutely unfair, and totally true – a trick that only a high critic knows how to pull off.” —Gore Vidal