Spring Noir is Here!

April 25, 2014April 29, 2014

We’re thrilled to announce this advance release of Norman Conquest’s REAR WINDOWS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FIFTY FILM NOIR CLASSICS—destined to become the bible of Film Noir studies

This special edition features digitally enhanced scenes from fifty Film Noir masterpieces as you’ve never seen them before. It’s a must-have reference for thrill-seeking aficionados, students of cinema, and collectors of offbeat artists’ books. Spanning the golden age of Noir (1941-1962), it includes over 50 rare photographic stills from memorable hard-boiled motion pictures, such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, and many more. Includes an illuminating introduction by Robert Wexelblatt, Professor of Humanities, Boston University.

ADVANCE PRAISE:

“…the most truthful book on Noir that’s out there.” —Tosh Berman, Tam Tam Books

“I’ve just been (re)reading Rancière on the mis-en-scene revolution in theatre at the end of C19th. Here Norman Conquest goes literally beyond the mis-en-scene and adds in a Wagnerian negation of the star system. Erase glamour! Bring forward the scene makers.“—Stefan Szczelkun

“This is conceptual art at its finest. Ingenious in its simplicity, startling, absurd, and very funny.” —Alec Burroughs

“Evocative… I like the various physical/psychological angles with which [Conquest] approaches the stills, each of which is elegantly if sometimes surprisingly effected.” —Harold Jaffe

This is No. 27 in our acclaimed Absurdist Texts & Documents Series.
Perfect-bound paperback. 68 pp. $16.00

CLICK HERE to order online.

Back in Print! (sort of)

April 22, 2014April 23, 2014

We’re pleased to announce that BLACK SCAT REVIEW – No. 1 (2012) is available in facsimile digital edition. If you missed it, now’s your chance to complete your collection of back issues.

The notorious “Cruci-Fiction” issue features works by Alphonse Allais, Florence Bocherel, Pierre Henri Cami, Pedro Carolino, Norman Conquest, John Crombie, S.N. Jacobson, Crad Kilodney, Michael Leigh, Samantha Memi, Doug Skinner, Yuriy Tarnawsky, and Tom Whalen.

PLUS, Elizabeth Archer’s interview with Samantha Memi, the UK’s flash fiction goddess and pastry chef.

You can order a print edition for the outrageous price of $1,000, or nab the spiffy digital edition for only $5.00.

Now that’s a steal!

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Get your head around this . . .

April 18, 2014April 18, 2014

“Yes. The best thing would be for me to go away. Everyone says so: Geneviève, Emmanuelle, Dr. Strouville; no doubt the milkman, the President of the Republic, and the Pope in Rome agree. The Minister might allow me a couple of weeks, but he’s been looking at me strangely of late, furtively but with intensity, as if trying to peer inside my skull and make a proper survey of the bleak thoughts to be found there…”

Crad Kilodney (1948-2014) R.I.P.

April 16, 2014April 16, 2014

mutants

The legendary absurdist writer Crad Kilodney passed away on April 14th.

I knew Crad back in the early days when he was hawking his outrageously titled books on the mean streets of Toronto. You can imagine the reception he received with books like the one shown above. People were either completely indifferent or fist-shakingly hostile. But that never stopped him. With crazy courage he stood his ground for 17 years. He produced 32 books of brilliant humor & satire.

I had the pleasure of collaborating with him on a few pieces (circa 1979) for Only Paper Today, an avant-garde Toronto newspaper.

He was often under the influence of Alphonse Allais, for he would interrupt his texts with hilarious asides and non sequiturs. One of my favorites appeared in the middle of a paragraph, sans parentheses: “Speed-readers go to hell.”

In 2012, I reprinted Crad’s story “Ed McBain Stole My Joke” in the first issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW.

Sad that he left us, but he has left me laughing — that’s the highest compliment I know.

Here’s a link to his obit and below a short documentary about him made in 1992 at York University .

Crad Kilodney from Tristen Bakker on Vimeo.

In the merry month of May…

April 16, 2014April 16, 2014

lit-ad

Featuring John Nickle, Kelli Stanley, J Kingston Pierce, Michael Hemmingson, Farewell Debut, Steven M. Markow, Michelle Gray, Larry Fondation, Susan Siegrist, Tom Larsen, Harold Jaffe, Carla M. Wilson, Peter Cherches, and Monika Mori.

Order or Chaos?

April 8, 2014April 8, 2014

Jules Torquemal is a middle-aged civil servant in the Ministry of Education living shortly before the First World War blew up the Belle Époque. His life is settled and his hobby is philosophizing of the complacent variety. One day, told by an indignant friend of a petty injustice, Torquemal finds questions he had thought long closed re-opening and the ground slipping beneath him. The world he believed morally moored and logically consistent suddenly appears to him anything but.

The Derangement of Jules Torquemal by Robert Wexelblatt is a wickedly clever (and haunting) philosophical puzzle.

This Black Scat Classic Interim Edition is limited to 100 copies. CLICK HERE to order

wexelblatt portrait

Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play, and a short novel, Losses. His novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.