APOLLO HAS LANDED!


“A work exuding such inventiveness, playfulness, humor, and heart, it dazzles the imagination.”
—Jeff Weisman, author of The Greatest Place on Earth

“A novella for our times, the author illuminates a world of uncertainty, misfortune, and absurdity with astonishing accuracy, simultaneously crafting a powerful and compelling story infused with hope and humor in his signature style.” —Adrienne Auvray

Apollo Camembert’s first novel, The Isolate, tells the tale of a man who has become so fed up with city life that he holes himself up in stealth housing to avoid all personal contact with the outside world. Unfortunately, the outside world has some nasty tricks up its sleeve.

We could say more, but that would risk giving too much away and we don’t want to spoil the fun. What we can reveal is that “Apollo Camembert” is the brainchild (and nom de plume) of Eckhard Gerdes who, after writing his gargantuan The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot, began composing shorter works, i.e., novellas and flash fictions, including two recent releases from Black Scat: Marco & Iarlaith and The Pissers’ Theatre.

We invite you to escape into Camembert’s quirky fictional world — a world you won’t soon forget.

THE ISOLATE
a novel by Apollo Camembert
paperback; 132 pp., $12.95
ISBN 979-8-9869224-6-1

Praise for Eckhard Gerdes’ THE  CHRONICLES OF MICHEL DU JABOT

“Whatever you do, don ´t even look into Eckhard Gerdes’ book, The Chronicles of Michel du Jabot, because you’ll never get out of it again! If J. Joyce were to be reincarnated—and instead of writing in his inextricably reinvented and rather illegible (without the help of an East European multi-lingual scholar) Panglish, were to practice an altogether clear and charmingly grammatical English as here (admittedly with a scatter of soft linguistic implosions but few)—he would have written this book. It will take generations of English professors to sort it out. Hilarious semantic sport. And don’t expect me to tell you what it is about. I would have to give you a involuted idio-semantic analysis with innumerable brackets and labels, which wouldn’t help anyway. No, okay then, dare to tip-toe into the cavernous echoing brain-chamber of Gerdes’ The Chronicles and if you’re  lucky you’ll come tumbling out into the dull everydaylight with a mad enlightened gleam in your eyes and will never read another novel. Yes, this- not Finnegans Wake—is the novel to end the novel.” —Alain Arias-Misson, author of Autobiography of a Character from Fiction

SADE’S SATIRICAL NOVELLA

In this rare novella by the Marquis de Sade, a marriage is arranged between the aging Judge de Fontanis and a young woman, Mademoiselle de Téroze, who (unbeknownst to him) is in love with someone else. The young woman and her brother-in-law (the Marquis d’Olincourt) perpetrate a series of practical jokes, humiliating hoaxes and elaborate schemes in order to deceive the judge and stop him from consummating the marriage.

This amusing tale is an artfully-written and beautifully-structured literary attack on the judiciary, and one of Sade’s most savagely satirical texts.

A JUDGE DECEIVED
Marquis de Sade
Translated from the French by R J Dent
Pocket Erotica #24
pp., 174; paper, $14.95

Two other humorous works by the Marquis de Sade are also available in the Pocket Erotica series.

MAD SCATTER

Forthcoming Titles:

Let’s Not Hit Each Other
Alphonse Allais

Her Three Daughters
Pierre Louÿs

Capital of Pain
Paul Éluard

Night Dreams: A Poem for Two Voices and a Secret Piano
Céline Arnauld

TYPO HAS ARRIVED!

 A truly unusual journal… 

PRINT magazine’s Steven Heller says: “Just what I’ve been waiting for.” 

De Villo Sloan in Asemic Front says: “TYPO is not another contribution to the wax museum of official culture. The editors interweave selections from what poet Ron Silliman calls the post-avant with the historic avant garde and esoteric visual-verbal examples from earlier centuries. Included are new iterations and genres in the continuum such as asemics, digital collage, neo-concrete and visual poetry as well as typographical innovations rooted in Lettrism. Accessible and highly enjoyable prose complements the flow of images.” 

TYPO #1: Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, & Constrained Design.
Trade paperback; 148 pp., $14.95

TYPO #1

In this issue: Marc-Alain Barbot; Tom Barrett; Michael Betancourt; Isabelle B.L; Restif de la Bretonne; Mamie Caton; Norman Conquest; Caroline Crépiat; Art Dandy; farewell debut; Ange Degheest; Jean-Pierre Duffour; Luc Fierens; Jack Granath; Isidore Isou; Amy Kurman; Claude Nicolas Ledoux; Giambattista Palatino; Raymond Queneau; Reese Saxment; Karen Shaw; Doug Skinner; Corinne Taunay; John J. Trause; Tristan Tzara; Cal Wenby; and Femke van der Wijk.

Get in on the ground floor with this collector’s edition.

TYPO : Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, & Constrained Design
Number 1.

6 x 9 inches; 148 pp.; paperback; $14.95
ISBN: 979-8-9869224-5-4

LATEST NEWS:

Typo: Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, & Constrained Design is the first in a promised (irregular) series of anthologies devoted to oddities of typographic design history, extending from now to the 1400s, including mnemonic devices, “Forty-Five First Letters” (they’re real!), “Surrealist Sign Language,” asemic writing, and lots more from Doug Skinner, Norman Conquest, Raymond Queneau, Isadore Isou and other contributors. Visually fun to look at and filled with interesting historical factoids about printing.
— i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden,
BOOK BEAT

TYPO in PRINT

TYPO hits the top of the charts on Amazon

RAVE REVIEW

“The first issue of TYPO … has arrived at an ideal moment in the evolution of avant garde and experimental art and writing. The monuments of the 20th century avant garde such as DaDa, Surrealism, Lettrism and Oulipo are enjoying healthy interest in the digital age, inspiring the creation of new genres.TYPO provides fresh insights and perspectives on these movements.

TYPO is not another contribution to the wax museum of official culture. The editors interweave selections from what poet Ron Silliman calls the post-avant with the historic avant garde and esoteric visual-verbal examples from earlier centuries. Included are new iterations and genres in the continuum such as asemics, digital collage, neo-concrete and visual poetry as well as typographical innovations rooted in Lettrism. Accessible and highly enjoyable prose complements the flow of images.”

—De Villo Sloan, ASEMIC FRONT 2

Read the full review HERE

LE CHAT NOIR EXPOSED

Caroline Crépiat talks about her book, Let Chat Noir Exposed: The Absurdist Spirit Behind a 19th Century French Cabaret, translated from the French by Doug Skinner.

Now available worldwide on Amazon.

DUCHAMP CLEARS THE AIR!

Ahh, a breath of French air!

Marcel Duchamp‘s exile in New York, in 1915-1917, brought him sudden fame and changed the course of his career. Corinne Taunay’s lively and witty study describes the scandals of “Nude Descending a Staircase” and “Fountain,” the creation of the first readymades, and the evolution of Duchamp’s artistic strategies. With 19 illustrations in black and white and in color.

Corinne Taunay is a visual artist and art historian who has contributed to many publications in Europe and the US.

MARCEL DUCHAMP: Paris Air in New York
Corinne Taunay
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner
Paper; 50 pp., 15.24 cm x 19.05 cm; illustrated; color; $14
nonfiction
ISBN 979-8-9869224-4-7

BACK TO STOOL

Originally released in a limited edition, this vastly expanded version of Black Scat’s Merde à La Belle Époque brings gastric laughter to all of America. This hilarious scatological anthology features verses, stories, songs, and playlets by some of Paris’s most inventive and eccentric comic writers of the period. It includes the exceedingly rare Le Journal des Merdeux — an illustrated broadside devoted entirely to merde. Indeed, upon its publication in 1882, The Little Shits’ Journal was seized by the police and banned. Merde!

This lovely, deodorized paperback edition, designed by Norman Conquest, has been exquisitely compiled, deftly translated, and introduced by Doug Skinner, and includes his erudite and witty notes on the texts.

Return to those raucous years of La Belle Époque when French “shiterature” scandalized Paris.

FICTION ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

Those familiar with Tom Whalen’s writing will have already skipped this sentence and jumped to the “buy now” button below. For those who have yet to experience his short fictions, you’re in for a treat.

In Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation ants make their way to the edge of the universe, an old doll rocks her nights away in the attic of an abandoned theater shop, “delivery trucks rumble up from the earth,” flies “feast off the flytrap of the sky,” a room falls in love with its inhabitant, and a man gives birth to a puppet. Populating the whole are troubled old men, grandmothers, a green man and priests, as well as dolls, mice, prose poets, and other fabular fauna. Drawn from Whalen’s work in the field over the past five decades, the sixty-seven prose poems and micro-fictions of The Grand Equation are comic, surreal, philosophical, disquieting and, as John Taylor commented in Michigan Quarterly Review on Whalen’s “Why I Hate the Prose Poem,” “particularly subtle.”

Reading Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation, I am reminded of my early years of writing prose poetry and reading the great masters of the form including Baudelaire, Jacob, Edson, Tate, and Simic. Like the great prose poets before him, Whalen’s work is startling, witty, surreal, and metaphysical. He uses the form to enchant and to entertain, to describe other worlds and offer new windows onto this one. His images, parables, and insights make the absurd seem ordinary and vice versa. And remind me that the world is not as I imagine it to be, and neither am I. This is a collection to ponder, savor and return to. 

—NIN ANDREWS, author of The Last Orgasm

THE GRAND EQUATION
Prose Poems and Micro-Fictions
Tom Whalen
$14.95 paperback
ISBN 979-8-9859996-8-6

Tom Whalen’s short prose has appeared in Great American Prose Poems, Sudden Fiction, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, The Best of the Prose Poem, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly, Unscheduled Departures, The Party Train and other anthologies. His two selections and translations of short prose by Robert Walser — Girfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape — are published with NYRB Classics. His novel The Straw That Broke and collection April Fireball: Early Stories are both available from Black Scat.