GOT NONSENSE?

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

We’re looking—make that Learing and lusting—for pure, unadulterated nonsense. The kind of nonsense that forces the reader to giggle and guffaw when s/he reads in bed at night. A beside book for these terrible times: LE SCAT NOIR BEDSIDE NONSENSE.

Seeking skillfully crafted short texts (800 words or less); poems; black and white drawings or comics. Prefer Word doc or PDF files. Avoid unnecessary formatting and design. Manuscripts should contain your name and email address. Artwork: black and white/grayscale  (300 dpi); formats: JPEG, TIFF, or PNG.

Include a brief bio in your cover letter. Email submissions to
blackscatbooks (AT) icloud (DOT) com.
Subject line must include the word “nonsense.”

DEADLINE: May 31, 2020. 

ECSTASY… NOW MORE THAN EVER

Amid the pain of pandemic, we hope this issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW provides some welcome relief while sheltering in place.

In Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus, ecstasy is characterized as divine madness or divine possession, and is considered to be a gift to humanity from the gods. However, we may choose to channel our erotic energies into sexual pleasure or the cultivation and worship of erotic beauty. A transcendent state expressed in poetry, a text, or images. This issue is devoted to the fleeting power of ecstasy in its myriad forms, subtle, unequivocal, or unabashedly palpable.

Contributors include: Peter Ruric, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Eurydice, Catherine D’Avis, Galya Kerns, Doug Skinner, Tom Whalen, Bob McNeil, Nicole Scherer, Tom Bussmann, Paul Rosheim, William Minor, Norman Conquest, Adam Matson, Dynamic Wang, Alexandr Ivanov, Jim McMenamin, Rhys Hughes, Amy Kurman, and Emiliano Vittoriosi.

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DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE!

It’s time to stock up for the long days ahead.

Click the covers to order on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember: read out the crisis, books don’t sneeze.

 

Visionary Essays

We’re excited to bring you this collection of visionary literary essays by British novelist, philosopher, lecturer, and critic, John Cowper Powys—a companion volume to our recent release of Powys on Books and Sensations. This uniform  trade paper edition features Powys’s “literary devotions” and critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El Greco, Milton, Charles Lamb, Dickens, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, Dostoyevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.

Originally published in 1915 as Visions and Revisions, this collection stood apart from critical writing at the time and added to Powys reputation. An eccentric genius, he is best known for his mystical novels, including the extraordinary Wolf Solent which we’re preparing for publication later this year.

“Powys is still ‘the master’ to me. His words, even today, have the power of bewitching me.” —Henry Miller

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Free Zine!

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The second issue of VIRAL PIRATE is hot off the virtual press—84 pages featuring nearly 100 photos of female vampires.

This electronic edition is  free for followers of this blog.

If you haven’t signed up yet, simply add your email address in the column at right, and we’ll keep you  up to date on all our books.

To receive a download link to the “Vampire Grrrls” issue of VP, send us an email and include the words “free zine” in the subject line.

blackscatbooks (AT) icloud (DOT) com 

LIT SENSATIONS

“English literature, like English history, teems with inspired dreamers and eccentrics: Bunyan, Blake, Hazlitt, Tolkien, and others, but none is quite as much of an all-rounder as Powys. He is as spiritual as Bunyan, as fantastical as Blake, as down-to-earth as Hazlitt, and every bit as much a fabulist as Tolkien. He is a unique necromancer of literature. He comforts and discomfits in equal measure. The word weird might have been invented just for him.” —Roger Boylan

This provocative collection features ILLUMINATING essays on some of the world’s greatest writers—Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, William Blake, Byron, Emily Brontë, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde.

Powys on Books and Sensations
JOHN COWPER POWYS
TRADE PAPERBACK, 342 PP., $14.95

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FEMME WITH FANGS

Sometimes after an hour of apathy, my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardour of a lover; it embarrassed me; it was hateful and yet overpowering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her, and her hot lips travelled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost in sobs, “You are mine, you shall be mine, and you and I are one for ever.”

This classic Gothic horror novel preceded Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years and was its inspiration. Carmilla is the first vampire story to feature a lesbian vampire. “Chilling and subtly erotic.”

 

CARMILLA
by Joseph Le Fanu
New Urge Editions (NU-119)
paperback, 180 pp., $12.95

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RISE & SHINE

There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel—a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness—was published in France in 1697. It was written by one Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, “the Casanova of the 17th century,” as an act of literary revenge. It is not simply vengeful, but it’s the first work in world literature to use the word “zombie” and stands as an early example of bizarre black humor. This outrageous relic—unearthed & translated from the French by the incomparable Doug Skinner—is the novel’s first appearance in English and features a preface by the great Guillaume Apollinaire.

_____________________Z-DAY___________________________

The Zombie of Great Peru has risen from the grave—unleashed worldwide by Black Scat in an appropriately fetid trade paperback edition, with sublime cover art and design by Norman Conquest.

Lock your doors and windows. Better yet, order it now before it’s too late!

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THE ZOMBIE OF GREAT PERU
Pierre-Corneille Blessebois
with a preface by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated from the French by Doug Skinner

$10.95
Paperback: 146 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0692409749

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APRIL FIREBALL

APRIL FIREBALL is HOT—nine early short stories by master fictioneer Tom Whalen. These texts were published between 1972 and 1996, and are previously uncollected. This must-have edition is framed by two stories that reflect the times and wars going on when they were written: “The Ride” (1970, Vietnam); “April Fireball” (1994, the Balkans).

April Fireball marks Whalen’s third title in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series.

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Tom Whalen’s books include Elongated Figures, Dolls, Winter Coat, The President in Her Towers, and The Straw That Broke. His translations of short prose by Robert Walser can be found in Selected Stories, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories, and the forthcoming Little Snow Landscape and Other Stories.