November 2020

“…In Behn’s novels, women too can embrace the previously masculinized pleasures of power. In The Fair Jilt, the heroine Miranda pursues the most extreme forms of libertinism as she seduces a series of men, twice attempts to have murdered the sister who inconveniently limits her financial power, and demonstrates the conflation of sexual and religious subversion typical of both French and English Restoration libertinism as she tries to rape a priest.” —Tiffany Potter, Genre and Cultural Disruption: Libertinism and the Early English Novel

Aphra Behn (1640 – 1689) was an English playwright, poet, translator and fiction writer from the Restoration era. The Fair Jilt is the first English novel ever written by a woman. A trailblazer, Behn broke cultural barriers and served as a literary role model for later generations of women authors. This edition is a must-have literary classic.

The Fair Jilt:
The Amours of Prince Tarquin & Miranda
Aphra Behn
New Urge Editions
paper; 100 pp., $12.95
ISBN: 979-8565118872

In honor of Donald Trump‘s historic election loss we’re bringing back an out-of-print classic from our Absurdist Texts & Documents series:

The thirteen poems penned by screenwriter/director Ed Wood during his lifetime will not to be found in the Ed Wood, Jr. Collection at Cornell University. Cornell is home to the original draft of Wood’s screenplay “Grave Robbers from Outer Space” (released in 1959 as “Plan 9 from Outer Space”), as well as his rare novels Killer in Drag (1965), Death of a Transvestite (1967), and others. There is not, however, a single shred of Wood’s poetry. The only evidence that “the world’s worst filmmaker” was also a poet of equivalent talent are several dozen rejection letters, including one from The New Yorker for a poem entitled “shreik” [sic].

According to Wood’s second (?) wife, the poet renounced his efforts as “pure crap” in 1968, and buried these thirteen unpublished works at the La Brea Tar Pits in California. A few days later, she attempted to retrieve the pages, but they had vanished from their unmarked grave. Wood subsequently coined the term “poesy-snatchers” to explain what had happened to his missing body of work.

Nearly 30 years later the poems were discovered inside an abandoned flying saucer that landed in Lodi, New Jersey. In 1996, the poems were published privately in a limited edition by a small press in Coronado, California under the title Selected Poems — despite the fact that the book represents Wood’s total poetic output.

Black Scat is proud to bring these lost odes back from the dead in a glowing, unexpurgated chapbook. We have erred on the side of caution and retained the original title for—who knows?—perhaps the bard will revisit our planet and dump some more gems.