Start the New Year off with a bang. Give different!
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Author: Black Scat Books
Publishers of Sublime Art & Literature Since 2012
Just in time for the holidays!
We proudly present the 15th volume in our grand Alphonse Allais Collection. Here is France’s greatest humorist in top form. This first English translation of WE ARE NOT SHEEP features 44 witty tales, PLUS four extra stories, translated by Allaisian scholar Doug Skinner, with his erudite introduction and complete notes on the text.
If you’re looking for laughter—(and, hell, who isn’t?)—this delightful edition is a gift that will long be remembered.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALPHONSE ALLAIS (1854-1905) was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination. In addition to composing absurdist texts for newspapers such as LE CHAT NOIR and LE JOURNAL, he experimented with holorhymes, pioneered conceptual art, and created the earliest known example of a silent musical composition: FUNERAL MARCH FOR THE OBSEQUIES OF A DEAF MAN (1884). Ahead of his time (as well as ours), Allais is needed now more than ever. His mischievous work remains fresh, funny, and always surprising.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
DOUG SKINNER has contributed to Black Scat Review, The Fortean Times, Strange Attractor Journal, Fate, Weirdo, Nickelodeon, Cabinet, and other fine publications. Black Scat Books has published several books of his stories, cartoons, and songs, as well as translations of Alphonse Allais, Charles Cros, Alfred Jarry, Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, Luigi Russolo, Caroline Crépiat, and Corinne Taunay. Other translations include Three Dreams (Giovanni Battista Nazari, Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks), The Cocktail Hour (Marcel Requien and Lucien Farnoux, with Gaylor Olivier, Corps Reviver), and Principles of Cerebral Mechanics (Charles Cros, Wakefield Press).
He has written music for several dance companies; his scores for actor/clown Bill Irwin include The Regard of Flight, The Courtroom, The Regard Evening, and The Harlequin Studies.
TV and movie appearances include Great Performances, Martin Mull’s Talent Takes a Holiday, Mike’s Talent Show, Ed, Crocodile Dundee II, several of George Kuchar’s videos, and a smattering of commercials.
His albums That Regrettable Weekend, It All Went Pfft, and An Afternoon in the Arboretum are available on Bandcamp.
Room Service…
Pihla, a beautiful journalist from Helsinki, is on an assignment to cover subterranean sex scenes across Europe. Although detached from the decadence she witnesses, Pihla needs a respite, and checks into the Grand Hotel Vittoria in the hills of Tuscany. And then she meets Giovanni…
The 27th volume in our collectible Pocket Erotica series is a sensual work of contemporary fiction by Nina Ansani. Warm up your holiday and visit the Grand Hotel Vittoria.
BUG OUT!
As the world comes to an end, and the bed bug infestation spreads from France throughout Europe, it is time for a journal devoted to infestation, invasion, and chaos.
Featuring works by Alphonse Allais; Tim Anderson; Tom Bradley; Norman Conquest; Farewell Debut; R J Dent; Larry Fondation; Jesse Glass; Boris Glikman; Rhys Hughes; Harold Jaffe; Amy Kurman; Terri Lloyd; John-Ivan Palmer; Jason E. Rolfe; Paul Rosheim; Thaddeus Rutkowski; Doug Skinner; Yuriy Tarnawsky; Corinne Taunay; Catrin Welz-Stein; Tom Whalen; Carol White; and D. Harlan Wilson.
Bed Bug in Portland!
Funny Farm …
What happens when constellations socialize, when Faust and the Devil start drinking, when imaginary friends gain imaginary friends, when Sleeping Beauty and Rip van Winkle trade places, when Duncan paints a cockatrice, when a terrifying Werechurch roams the land? And was it really a good idea for August and Collier to start that potato farm, especially given Collier’s troubled past? Doug Skinner defines his own comic genre, filled with vivid characters, fictional physics, and surprising narratives, often filtered through stringent constraints to keep the language lively. If you read only one book this year, read this one over and over again!
Happy B’day, Alphonse Allais!
A toast to France’s greatest humorist!
Here in America, Black Scat Books has published thirteen collections by the master absurdist — all skillfully translated by Doug Skinner. And coming this December — we’ll bring you Allais’s 14th book—WE ARE NOT SHEEP.
While you’re waiting, please check out our vast Alphonse Allais Collection below. These volumes will keep you laughing throughout 2024. (Click on the titles below for details.)
Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks
Happy Halloween
This year we’re celebrating the holiday early with author Amy Kurman. Listen closely as she reads a creepy tale from her new book, SHORTS and other fiction.
Enjoy!
CLICK HERE to order her collection of edgy, witty, strange, & sexy short stories.
The great Powell’s Bookstore in Portland.
Alphonse Allais Speaks!
A Black Scat Exclusive video—Alphonse Allais speaking French. (Well, not really, but he has an accent.)
CLICK HERE to view our collection of Alphonse Allais’s titles in English, translated from the French by Doug Skinner.
Unboxing SHORTS (and other fiction)
Author Amy Kurman gets her first peek at her new fiction collection.
You too can share in Amy’s delight by ordering your very own copy.
First Book
It’s an exciting time at Black Scat when we get the chance to publish a talented writer’s first book. So we’re ecstatic to announce the launch of Amy Kurman‘s collection of fiction — SHORTS.
Featuring edgy, witty, strange, & sexy short stories by a powerful new voice
This is now a BLACK SCAT BOOKS BESTSELLER!
ADVANCE PRAISE for SHORTS
“Short stories that gleefully jettison all the rules and hydroplane across the most unexpected surfaces, freeing the imagination to crash into the world full speed.”
—Tantra Bensko, author of Floating on Secrets
“Those of you who have not yet met the work of Amy Kurman are in for a treat. Her debut collection is compelling, quirky, and crafted with effective attention to detail. Some passages could easily be sung for how mellifluous they are. Shorts is a compendium of compelling juxtapositions, a contrapuntal delight, but, most of all, it is the type of work that resonates in the mind long after the actual reading has ended. Kurman has the rare ability to write prose in feminine and masculine voices. Her sardonic story, ‘A Night at the Zoo,’ reads like an old black-and-white film, like something Alec Guinness or Charlie Chaplin might have done. Excellent!” —Eckhard Gerdes, author of The Pissers’ Theatre
“Don’t be fooled by the length of the affectionately bizarre stories in Shorts. A colony of dryads, a sentient Kit-Kat clock called by its wrong name, two moles in an existential marital crisis, these tropes of strangeness belie an underbelly of social commentary about the human condition that I couldn’t stop reading.
A new satirist is in our midst.”
—Suzanne Burns, author of The Veneration of Monsters
The. author at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland.
blackscatbooks.com 