The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses

A star-studded twist on the creativity-sparking game that invites players to complete drawings and stories—without knowing where they started—to produce surprising collaborations

The game of Exquisite Corpse is simple: two or more people create an unpredictable artwork by folding the paper to hide each contribution, leaving only small connective lines for clues. The unfolded page reveals a finished collaboration—sometimes wacky, sometimes twisted, and always unique. With this book, you can create your own Exquisite Corpses, with friends or on your own, because the pages are already packed with potential collaborators.

Here are dozens of remarkable cartoonists, illustrators, animators, and tattoo artists waiting for you to complete their drawings. You might find yourself creating art with a renowned fabric designer (Wesley Mancini), a Pulitzer-winning TV critic (Emily Nussbaum), the Tony-winning costume designer for Hamilton (Paul Tazewell)—or one of your favorite musicians (Grace Slick, Moby, Robby Krieger of the Doors, Chris Frantz of Talking Heads).

Other pages invite you to test your wordsmithing skills, using a single sentence to launch a story. You’ll spin tales with bestselling authors Chuck Klosterman and Aimee Bender; rock stars Rivers Cuomo (Weezer) and Gavin Rossdale (Bush); TV writer and producer Jane Espenson (Buffy the Vampire Slayer); and legendary actor Stephen Fry, to name a few.

André Breton and his fellow surrealists developed this imagination-bending technique more than a century ago, and it’s still a hit at parties today. The works of art you create with The Beautiful Book of Exquisite Corpses will shock and delight you—all resulting from a long-distance partnership like nothing you’ve experienced before.