Alfred Chester Click here to see other works by Alfred Chester

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