Cadaver Exquisito Jun 2026

Agustina Bazterrica Genre: Dystopian / Horror / Literary Fiction

If you would like to explore this topic further, please let me know. I can provide for teaching this method, a list of materials needed for a workshop, or a literary analysis of Bazterrica’s novel! cadaver exquisito

Surrealists understood the corpse as an “automaton of the collective unconscious.” Later, Oulipo writers (e.g., Italo Calvino, Raymond Queneau) repurposed the constraint, replacing chance with rigorous formal rules (e.g., the avalanche of nouns ). By the 1960s, Fluxus artists expanded the game to actions, sounds, and images. Agustina Bazterrica Genre: Dystopian / Horror / Literary

In 1925, at 54 rue du Château in Paris, Marcel Duhamel, Jacques Prévert, and Yves Tanguy invented a word game. A player wrote a phrase on a sheet of paper, folded it to conceal all but the last word, and passed it to the next player. The resulting sentence— Le cadavre – exquis – boira – le vin – nouveau (The exquisite corpse will drink the new wine)—gave the game its name. The phrase was neither grotesque nor morbid; its power lay in the accidental syntax, the improbable adjacency of “corpse” and “exquisite,” “drink” and “wine.” By the 1960s, Fluxus artists expanded the game

Agustina Bazterrica’s Cadáver Exquisito (translated into English as Tender Is the Flesh ) is one of the most disturbing books to come out of contemporary Latin American literature in recent years. It is a novel that takes a single, high-concept horror premise and strips it of all glamour, resulting in a story that is less about monsters and more about the terrifying banality of evil.