Imagine how it feels to go from sow's ear to silk purse or vice versa, how a body stretched to a new dimension never returns to its original mind. The Chest That Launched a Thousand Slips is a collection of ten prickly situations imagined to their extremes, thought-provoking and sometimes quirky literary short fiction that explores the motivations, insecurities, terrors, and delights of the plastic people—both the patients who get nipped and tucked and the beauty doctors who make it happen. Loosely themed around a setting of plastic surgery, the stories range from short-short to long, hilarious to terrifying, orderly to twisted, cerebral to dreamlike.

Populated by a man with his head connected backwards, an MIA plastic surgeon, an out-of-control robotic surgeon, an angry attorney interrogating his wife's breast surgeon, a passenger on a crashing plane, a medical entrepreneur out to remake the very definition of beauty, the human soul, and a frustrated cosmetic surgeon's wife among many others, enter into a fabulous world of doctors and their clientele as they struggle with relationships, self-image, gender issues, deeper meaning, and, of course, aging and death.

Authored by an oculoplastic surgeon, the medical and scientific details are for the most part accurate. However, these are not tales about your mother's plastic surgery but rather the human condition. Discover what doesn't begin to show on the glossy marketing photos or the made-for-TV dramas, and get ready to forever change how you think about the discipline, its practitioners, and its recipients.