Category: Absurdist Texts & Documents
Eat Your BOAR!
That is—Terry Southern‘s HOT HEART OF BOAR & Other Tastes. It’s a tasteful smorgasbord of unpublished works by the master satirist—author of the novels Candy and The Magic Christian. and the screenwriter behind such classics of black humor as The Loved One and Dr. Strangelove. This new collection is perfect-bound, wrapped in a lovely cover, and seasoned to perfection with appropriately explicit visuals by Norman Conquest. The edition is limited to 125 copies and you can order a copy right here.
Get it while it’s hot!

Captain Cap Sails Again!
Climb aboard and pop your corks, Captain Cap (Vol II) sets sail today!
We recognize the inherent risks of launching a book on the first day of April, yet we’ve decided to push ahead—(or should we say shove off?)—since it’s entirely appropriate when the author is Alphonse Allais, the great French innovative humorist. Moreover, on this very day in 1897, Paul Ollendorff christened Allais’s Album primo-avrilesque (April Foolish Album)—a portfolio featuring seven monochromatic paintings which anticipated abstract art. Sadly, the album has gone unnoticed by so-called “art historians,” but we’ll leave that fight for another day.
Presently, this second volume—(two more to follow!)—gets down to the nitty-gritty, i.e., Allais’s legendary stories peppered with bizarre inventions, tall tales, philandering, and—oh yes—frequent liquid refreshments. Come to think of it, the phrase “traveling the high seas” may well have been coined in honor of the good captain’s bar-hopping.
Now’s your chance to discover a whole world of exotic trivia, such as…
- THE SECRET BEHIND MEAT-LAND
- UNKNOWN FACTS ABOUT GIRAFFES
- HOW TO PAY ONE’S AMOROUS DEBTS
- EXPERIMENTS IN HYPNOTISM
- NAME THAT ORANGUTAN
- INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS
- HOW TO RECYCLE CONFETTI
And much, much more.
The Apparent Symbiosis Between the Boa and Giraffe has been painstakingly translated by the versatile Doug Skinner. who has illustrated the book with 17 original drawings done in true Allaisian spirit. He also provides an enlightening introduction and extensive notes containing historical tidbits that bring La Belle Époque alive.
At over 100 pages, this collectible edition marks a watershed moment for the Absurdist Texts & Documents series, and is one of several reasons why the word “chapbook” should be thrown overboard.
So don’t miss out on this gala voyage. Click here and order a copy.
We wish you all a happy April Fool’s! (And that’s no joke.)
Dinner is served!
Fresh from the oven comes HOT HEART OF BOAR—piping hot and throbbing—in a limited edition of 125 copies. The collection features rare, unpublished texts, including an excerpt from The Hunters of Karinhall—a bloody brilliant uproduced screenplay (emphasis on “bloody”). There’s also a private letter to William Burroughs; a vomiting priest; “K.Y. Madness,” and more. In addition to the author’s culinary delights, you’ll find illuminating introductory notes by Nile Southern, as well as tastefully explicit illustrations by Norman Conquest.
In short, it’s is a full-boar feast for famished fans of black humor.
Book Worship
On Monday 25 March, 7 pm. at McNally-Jackson, 52 Prince Street, between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, Richard Kostelanetz will present over one dozen recent books rarely, if ever, seen before, most of them extending his earlier achievements at the intersection of literature and book-art, many of them produced with the seductive new technology of “on-demand printing” and thus reasonably priced, at least for now.
Among them are Epiphanies, two vols., 1000 pages, one story to a book page, culminating thirty years of work with resonant single-sentence climax moments in otherwise nonexistent fictions, a typographical feast for a monumental project, 8½” x 11”.
Conceptual Fictions, an extended essay with examples about the framing of implicit narratives.
Visual Fictions, collecting pages designed more than a decade ago for hisOpenings and Complete Stories, along with his Leonardo and Me.
Verbal Fictions, various formally alternative narratives that are not visually enhanced.
Vocal Shorts, an expanded edition of his texts designed for live performance for various numbers of players.
Openings Short Fictions, in the tradition of Epiphanies, the initial sentences of otherwise nonexistent stories.
Reflections on Loving and Relationships, his aphorisms continuously on right-hand pages against drawings of men and women made by the prominent choreographer Frances Alenikoff.
Furtherest Fictions, which reprints, revised, an earlier collection of his exploration of radically alternative narrative well beyond what every other fictioner is doing.
A Universe of Sentences, a continuous selection of lines by others worth remembering, the whole representing a universe of experience.
1001 Stories Enumerated, single-sentence fictions that, unlike Openings andEpiphanies, are meant to be complete in themselves.
Erotic Minimal Fictions, a variety of prose alternatives constituting the apex of avant-garde erotica.
Fields/Arenas/Pitches/Turfs, which completes the publication of geometric poems—with four, eight, and sixteen words to a large book page–begun thirty years ago.
1-99: A Book, another Kostelanetz narrative, in the tradition of Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979), composed only of numerals.
Ghostories, which are fictions created by boldfacing certain letters within a single word (e.g., address).
Homophones: Stories, where narratives are composed from two or sometimes more words that sound alike if spelled differently.
To & Fro &, where the reader’s discovery of narratives depend upon turning the book’s pages.
Ops & Clos, where opening and closings words, each pair with its own typography, are interspersed amidst each other.
English, Really English, in which he collects English words that seem incredible—over five thousand of them alphabetically in several perfectbound volumes.
What I Didn’t Do, which epitomizes intellectual nonhistory as Kostelanetz’s record of proposals that were never supported.
A Book of Eyes, photocopied and velobound, which explores the richly various ways that the single letter between H and J appears in contemporary typography
His presentation may also include such slightly older books as Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia), his latest collection of mostly severe criticism; Three Poems (NY Quarterly), where his experiments with three strains of one-word poetry appear interspersed; Micro Fictions (Archae), a limited-edition hardback with 900 pages of Louis Bury’s imaginatively designed narratives all three words and less; the reprint of his classic anthology of alternative expositions, Essaying Essays (AC Books); and maybe some others.
In May, Black Scat will publish Richard’s new book The Works & Life of Kosty Richards: An American Career in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series (#15)—thus adding to this vast library of experimental fiction.
Southern Discomfort…

A yummy treat (for those with strong stomachs) is coming soon in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series…a new collection of strange “tastes” from the late master chef Terry Southern:
HOT HEART OF BOAR & Other Tastes
We’ll be serving it fresh—piping hot and throbbing—in a limited edition of only 125 copies. First come, first served.
The book features rare unpublished texts, including an excerpt from The Hunters of Karinhall—a screenplay that, sadly, was never filmed. It’s a bloody masterpiece, and we do mean bloody. There’s also a private letter to William Burroughs; a vomiting priest; “K.Y. Madness,” and more.
In addition to the author’s culinary delights, you’ll find illuminating introductory notes by Nile Southern, as well as tastefully explicit illustrations by Norman Conquest.
In short, it’s a full-boar feast for famished fans of black humor.
Prepare to dig in.
Tzara in London
Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara by Isidore Isou, (translated by Doug Skinner) was on display recently in London at an exhibition of DADA, LETTRISM, FLUXUS, FUTURISM, SOUND & CONCRETE POETRY, curated by Frédéric Acquaviva. Alas, we were not there for the festivities, but hear that the book was quite popular with attendees.
There are only a few copies remaining in Scat’s limited edition, so if you haven’t nabbed one … now’s the time. CLICK HERE
The whole world is reading…
A Rave for Captain Cap!
Doug Skinner’s sublime translation of Alphonse Allais’s Captain Cap (Vol. I) has received a rave from the prestigious Leonardo Reviews in the UK. The complete text is now available online at this link
The review was written by Edith Doove (University of Plymouth) and here are a few excerpts:
“The translation into English of Captain Cap as the first in a series of three is both welcome and very timely. It is welcome since the Absurdist Texts & Documents Series by Black Scat Books project has filled an important void since the only other English venture into Allais’ writing, The World of Alphonse Allais, translated by Miles Kingston and published in hardback by Chatto & Windus in 1976, was made available in a paperback in 2008. But apart from long awaited, Captain Cap also comes at a timely moment because of the fact that its ironies are particularly opposite today as we witness global intellectual colonisation. The importance of not forgetting about the French context and its originality for a true understanding of this text was underlined by the former director of the National Library of France Jean-Noël Jeanneney when he launched a counter-attack against the American (U.S.A) imperialism by Google Books in which search results for European writers initially were mostly provided in English, (which resulted in the establishment of the Europeana Libraries – http://www.europeana-libraries.eu). The first book that Jeanneney showed in the course of recent documentary ‘Google and the World Brain’ (BBC, 2013) was Diderot’s Encyclopédie, which, without wanting to be overly chauvinistic, does put things in the right order. He dryly remarks (in French with English sub-titles) that on being confronted with the gift of a small thermo flask, brought to him by a Google Book VP in order to win him over, it was clear to him that they clearly did not understand who the director of the National Library of France actually was, or better, what he (commercially) represents. The documentary also identified similar misunderstandings or even better ‘misreadings’ by Google Books when, for example, the initial cataloguing of Walt Whitman’s famous book of poems ‘Leaves of Grass’ went under Gardening, and when it failed to recognize that Japanese books need to be scanned vertically rather than horizontally, turning any search result in complete nonsense. Such faux pas are hilarious after the event rather than the absurd way in which Allais’ texts actually points to – even anticipates – these kinds of dangers in an indirect or implicit way. So aside from the sheer pleasure of meeting an old friend, his observations have relevance now more than 100 years later.”
“This publication of Captain Cap is a little gem. It is wonderful that not-for profit publisher Black Scat Books, which seems to operate in true pataphysical tradition with former bookstore owner Norman Conquest (sic) as its ‘Président-Fondateur’ clearly respecting its French origins, has taken the initiative to bring Allais’ text to the attention of the English-speaking world.”
And on that note, let us remind you the edition is limited. You can order a copy here while they last.
Hooray for Captain Cap!








