Take DaDa Wherever You Go!

New Kindle Edition!

We’ve just released a eBook edition of the DADA classic WHAT A LIFE! Now you can take DADA wherever you go.

On August 17 1911—seven years before Max Ernst took up scissors and paste to create his early Dada art—WHAT A LIFE! was published in London by Methuen & Co. The authors, Edward Verrall Lucas (a travel writer) and George Morrow (an illustrator and regular contributor to PUNCH), produced their satirical autobiography using illustrations cut from the pages of Whiteley’s General Catalogue. This inspired act of artistic vandalism was a precursor to many works of avant-garde art and satire. CLICK HERE TO ORDER

THE CROS FLIES!

CHARLES CROS: COLLECTED MONOLOGUES

It’s back to cool with the great French monologist,  humorist, poet, and inventor—in a trenchant translation by Doug Skinner.

***FIRST PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH!***

Born in1842, Charles Cros was one of the most brilliant minds of his generation, equally adept at poetry, fiction, and scientific inquiry. He wrote smutty verses with Verlaine, synthesized gems with Alphonse Allais, contributed wild prose fantasies to Le Chat Noir, and experimented with color photography and sound recording, only to die young, poor, and alcoholic. Not incidentally, he also invented the comic monologue for the actor Coquelin Cadet. In these strikingly spontaneous and modern sketches, he introduces a gallery of fools and obsessives—The Clean Man, The Fencing Master, The Capitalist, The Friend of the Family—all nattering away, assaulting the audience with trivia, and blithely unaware of their own failings.

This edition collects all 22 of Cros’s monologues—masterfully translated & introduced by Doug Skinner—and includes performance notes by Coquelin, plus two biographical essays by his friend and colleague Alphonse Allais.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

“The sheer playfulness of certain fanciful parts of Cros’s work must not let us forget that in the center of some of his finest poems, a revolver is aimed at us.”—André Breton

TODAY!!

Today is the day Debra Di Blasi‘s cutting-edge alternative fictions flash before our eyes. This provocative new collection reveals our secret lives on social media — exposes the code behind our narcissistic sexting & selfies with feral wit. Indeed, this book is a savage bible defining our digital existence, here & now. Today.

TODAY is the day of resurrection and death in the NEW AMERICA. TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR DEBRA DI BLASI:

Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER is a fierce and real-time live-stream pastiche that inhabits voices and points-of-view of our new “American” multitude. Terrifyingly sincere and aching with loss one moment, angry, cruel, even bigoted the next, Di Blasi’s anti-Whitmanian universe expands and collapses into every imaginable corner of what our world has become, to salvage true moments out of this white noise at the penetralia of our virtual hornet’s nest, in which bodies have somehow come alive, “crawled right out of the trashbin of history into the light of public office.”  How it smokes and hums with danger! Readers beware: This hilarious and moving book is not a safe space.—Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock

No one else writes about the current social climate with the badass gusto of Debra Di Blasi. No one! Politically incorrect, seriously playful, often shocking, incorrigible in all the right ways, self-indicting, yet devastatingly human, Di Blasi’s prose grabs contemporary culture by the throat and holds on in a dazzling stranglehold where the “I” of the shitstorm is “you.” -Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music far a Gleaming Woman

Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER gives us a compelling third option: It will end in a whir of pronouncements, gossip, apologies, braggadocio, and the rest of the nonstop human noise we call culture. In 138 very short fictions ranging from the TV show “Chopped” to a pig farm, a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room and the fantasies of a college professor, Di Blasi’s compressed prose and linguistic play result in a jack-in-the-box kind of release found in good poetry. This is a writer in full control of language, from regional idiom to scientific jargon. “I wish to speak of things that are not I” says a character in one story, even as the character in another acts out the wish for permeability “I stuck my finger inside. Something bled. I’m sure it was you.” Despite our desire to escape the metaphysical and envi­ronmental catastrophes we’ve long wrought by now flirting with the concept of a human-robot future, Di Blasi reminds us elegantly and fero­ciously exactly where our human actions have placed us. -Leslie McGrath, author of Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives

Today Is the Day That Will Matter: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions
by Debra Di Blasi
Trade paperback, 150 pages, $12.95

NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE ON AMAZON  — CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON AMAZON BEFORE IT’S CENSORED.

THANK YOU!

WE’RE PLEASED TO REPORT THAT OUR SUMMER JAMBOREE WAS A GREAT SUCCESS. WE SALUTE ALL THE GENEROUS SUPPORTERS WHO DONATED TO THE FUNDRAISING DRIVE.

FOR THOSE UNABLE TO PARTICIPATE, THE BEST WAY TO SUPPORT THIS SMALL PRESS IS TO READ OUR BOOKS. PLEASE CONSIDER PURCHASING A TITLE OR TWO FOR YOUR SUMMER READING.

LOTS OF EXCITING NEW TITLES TO CHOOSE FROM.

 

**TOURIST** HAS ARRIVED!

If Black Scat opened a cinema in San Francisco, we’d be screening Temenuga Trifonova‘s TOURIST—the award-winning film based on her innovative novel.

Instead, we’ve done the next best thing: published TOURIST  in a Black Scat Paperback Original edition.

TOURIST IS “Mysterious, strange, and VERY funny”…

Meet Jack Sturrett, a book reviewer for a London literary magazine. Dissatisfied with his job, he makes an impulsive decision to leave the city without informing anyone of his departure. He boards a bus which takes him to a small town up north where he gets a job as a tourist guide after becoming so widely read in the town”s history that he passes for a local. Outside work he maintains the identity of a tourist, living in hotels and con­stantly reinventing his back-story. As his fake local persona becomes threateningly real, he finds himself a suspect in a murder investigation.

 NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE

CLICK HERE to order your copy on Amazon

ABOUT THE AUTHOR 

Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. Her first novel, Rewrite, was published by NON Publishing (Vancouver) in 2014. A film adaptation of Tourist (2017, 100 min), which she wrote and directed herself, won “Best Feature” at Mostra del Cinema di Taranto, Italy (2018). The film has also been screened at the Philosophical Film Festival (Skopje, 2018), and the Blow-Up International Art House Film Festival (Chicago, 2017). Trifonova is the author of the scholarly monographs Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (2007), and the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017) and European Film Theory (2008). She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House (France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), the New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in St. Petersburg. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Le Studium Centre for Advanced Studies in Tours, France.

Trifonova’s vision in her own words: “My work explores questions of identity: How do we know who we are? What are the limits of one’s identity? What are the limits of a delusion? Is it possible to escape from oneself? Is it possible to fail at being oneself? My characters often feel they are in control of their lives only to find out that they might not be who they thought they were, or that the world might not conform to their beliefs and expectations.”