Andrei Codrescu

Thus Spake the Corpse: 1988-1998: Volume 2 Fictions, Travels and Translations - An Exquisite Corpse Reader Andrei Codrescu

From 1983 to 1998, Exquisite Corpse: A Journal of Books & Ideas delighted the indignant and the sophisticated and gave heartburn to the fearful and the tenured. A thorn in the side of the Literary Establishment, it attracted a cadre of contributors united by a kind of suicidal fearlessness against The Way We Think Now. Here, in two generous volumes, the editors choose some of their favorite items from an over-rich decade. These are the pieces that set the standard, enraged some peoplef, and made the magazine necessary to those readers who, in the words of the editors, "banged their fists on unread stacks of New Yorkers and cried out as one, 'Where were you when we were dying for lack of real poetry and speculation?' "

Highlights: "Lives of the Poets," including Pete Seeger on Charles Olson; Jan Kerouac on her father, Jack; John Kehoe on Charles Bukowski; Keith Abbott on Ted Berrigan; Edward Field on Alfred Chester; and (notoriously) Mark Spitzer on Ed Dorn. Fiction by Maxine Chernoff, Maggie Dubris, Barry Gifford, Eric Kraft, and twenty-three others. Travel notes (very loosely construed) by Hakim Bey, Andrei Codrescu, Pat Nolan, and Anne Waldman, And translations of Boris Vian by Julia Older, of Vladimir Pistalo by Charles Simic, of Attila Jozsef by John Batki, and of the Romanian poets of the 60's generation by several accomplished hands.