The Zombie lurches forward, seeking readers as its prey!

April 3, 2015

There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel—a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness—was published in France in 1697. It was written by one Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, “the Casanova of the 17th century,” as an act of literary revenge. It is not simply vengeful, but it’s the first work in world literature to use the word “zombie” and stands as an early example of bizarre black humor. This outrageous relic—unearthed & translated from the French by the incomparable Doug Skinner—is the novel’s first appearance in English and features a preface by the great Guillaume Apollinaire.

_____________________Z-DAY___________________________

The Zombie of Great Peru has risen from the grave—unleashed worldwide today by Black Scat Books in an appropriately fetid trade paperback edition, with sublime cover art and design by Norman Conquest.

Lock your doors and windows. Better yet, order it now before it’s too late!

THE ZOMBIE OF GREAT PERU
Pierre-Corneille Blessebois
with a preface by Guillaume Apollinaire
translated from the French by Doug Skinner

$10.95
Paperback: 146 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0692409749

BLACK SCAT REVIEW 11—Now Available!

March 26, 2015March 27, 2015

New format, new size, new design PLUS a boatload of great artists and writers: Alphonse Allais, Nika Baum,Sandra Boersma, S. C. Delaney, Tony Duvert, Margie Franzen, William L. Gibson, Kristien Hemmerechts, Andy Koopmans, Richard Kostelanetz, Terri Lloyd, Happy Nightmares, L T O’Rourke, Derek Pell, Bobby Phillips, Agnès Potier, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Nelly Sanchez, Doug Skinner, Mark Stewart, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Carla M. Wilson. 116 pages of sublime art and lit.

BLACK SCAT REVIEW is an international magazine of the arts unlike any other. Issue #11 includes translations of exciting work by Kristien Hemmerechts, Tony Duvert, and Alphonse Allais.

Available now direct from our printer – CLICK HERE

Or from Amazon worldwide

Spring Fever!

March 21, 2015March 21, 2015

THE NEW URGE READER:
Erotic Fiction by New Women Writers
edited by Norman Conquest

The long-awaited international anthology of erotic fiction by women writers has arrived—just in time!

Got Spring Fever? If not, here’s your ticket to an advanced case—featuring work by Emily June Brink, Suzanne Burns, Catherine D’Avis, Rachel Kendall, Cody Kmoch, Pamela Naruta, L T O’Rourke, Maria Schurr, Star Spider, and L C Wilkinson. Packed with innovative tales revealing Eros in a variety of styles – poetic, playful, startling and graphic. Seduction guaranteed.

Available everywhere on Amazon.

Desires that Disappear

March 9, 2015

And words got souls just as much as we do. Words change when you say them, the way your soul changes when the right woman touches you. Same with photographs. They got souls. You look into a photograph too long, too hard, and you steal the very soul of the photograph…

Doug Rice, from Here Lies Memory

cover final

These remarkable photographic moments – memories – faces from the street – dig below the surface of flesh and go to the bone where forgotten words are etched. Words like lost souls in joyless eyes. AN EROTICS OF SEEING goes far beyond today’s omnipotent street images, the snapshots and candid portraits that reveal only surfaces. Doug Rice captures epiphanies in the faces of strangers— finds an “erotic” connection only a visionary artist can discover. It is not simply a matter of capturing the “decisive moment” — it is the depth his eye perceives —piercing crowded public spaces and revealing absences – ghosts and their memories – the very soul of our transient lives.

AN EROTICS OF SEEING:
The force of photography as philosophy’s broken sentence
Photographs and text by Doug Rice
5.25″ x 8.25″, perfect-bound paper. 64 pp.,
$20 / Edition limited to 300 copies
ART PHOTOGRAPHY

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

“Doug Rice reveals things about loss, memory, language, invention – things that we didn’t know needed to be said or seen, but learn it in the miraculous accident Rice realizes as writing and photography, and offers it as an inexplicable generosity that resonates with the generosity that Rice intuits in the world he re-inhabits.”
-EARL JACKSON, author of Strategies of Deviance

Alphonse Today! —Hip! Hip! Allais!

March 4, 2015March 4, 2015

drawing by Doug Skinner

Who was the hippest cat to ever hang his hat at Le Chat Noir in Paris? Alfred Jarry? Erik Satie? Apollinaire? No! Alphonse Allais, of course — the fellow who experimented with holorhymes, invented conceptual art, and created the earliest known example of a silent musical composition: Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884). Furthermore, you don’t need a Time Machine to travel back to 1893 to read Allais’s oddly titled collection Le parapluie de l’escouade. In fact — thanks to Doug Skinner’s inspired translation — you don’t even have to read French to enjoy all 39 wickedly funny texts in The Squadron’s Umbrella because Black Scat Books has launched its first publication in English. Yes, it’s another coup for this little house, and a landmark for lovers of French literature and Pataphysical humor.

SQUAD

ALPHONSE ALLAIS (1854 – 1905) was France’s greatest humorist. His elegance, scientific curiosity, preoccupation with language and logic, wordplay and flashes of cruelty inspired Alfred Jarry, as well as succeeding generations of Surrealists, Pataphysicians, and Oulipians. The Squadron’s Umbrella collects 39 of Allais’s funniest stories — many originally published in the legendary paper Le Chat Noir, written for the Bohemians of Montmartre. Included are such classic pranks on the reader as “The Templars” (in which the plot becomes secondary to remembering the hero’s name) and “Like the Others” (in which a lover’s attempts to emulate his rivals lead to fatal but inevitable results). These tales have amused and inspired generations, and now English readers can enjoy the master absurdist at his best. As the author promises, this book contains no umbrella and the subject of squadrons is “not even broached.”

THE SQUADRON’S UMBRELLA
by Alphonse Allais
Translated with an introduction, notes and illustrations by Doug Skinner

6” x 9”, trade paperback. 160 pp., Illustrated.
$12.95 / ISBN -13 978-0692392126

FICTION / FRENCH LITERATURE / HUMOR

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLACK SCAT BOOKS:

Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks by Alphonse Allais
Translated by Doug Skinner

Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais
Compiled and translated by Doug Skinner

NU Imprint Launches Today!

January 10, 2015February 11, 2021

OUT OF PRINT

We’re thrilled to announce the publication of WHITE FIRE & OTHER TALES by Cody Kmoch. This is the first book in our New Urge Editions imprint—devoted to quality erotic fiction by writers from Europe and North America.

This collection features eleven erotic tales by Ms. Kmoch a young writer based in the UK. Her sensual—often startling—sapphic stories reveal an innovative imagination – a quirky, dark sensibility that transports the reader to worlds of white fire, where fantasies, love, and sex unite. She stirs suspense and desire with a voice that is fresh and compelling.

$12.95
Trade paperback, 182 pp.

In 2013, Cody began posting stories on her blog and quickly developed a dedicated following.

A small sampling of comments from readers:

“… flawless…I can’t seem to find any reasonable words with which to describe it. The way you use language is just… gah. Keep doing what you do, please.” – anonymous (on The Luculla Hive)

“Pleasantly surprised, the talent of the author blew me away. She had the ability to capture me and hold me. Very refreshing, I’m totally addicted.” – Reese Michelle

“…this is excellent, this is brilliant. It is very erotic, it is very funny. it is a brilliant use of written form–it may very well be perfect. I’ve ran across a couple of stories vaguely in this vain (both a long time ago) but not at all so clearly conceived or proficiently and cleanly executed. Has anyone ever done this before ? It seems like it would have had to have been, but I really have never heard of this really like this. I feel like a ‘Classic.’ story is one which after you first read it you can’t quite imagine the world without this story having been written–That’s how I feel about this one. The idea of the seduction of the imagination has never been so perfectly expressed and the humor and eroticism are so organic to the story. Is there anything as seductive as the written word when written so well.” – Leslie Petra

“I think of your stories as blossoming flowers…” – anonymous (unfortunately!)

“You, you are amazing, this story is exalting, an wonderful! All of your writing fills me with happiness, I don’t even remember how I found it, but I am so glad that I did.” – Olla Prayer

“Blown away. Really good. Innovative, yet fun and highly charged” – anonymous

***

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Cody Kmoch is a curious product of Czech and Canadian blood, British grammar school bullying, chronic sexual frustration, and the internet. She has been drawing and writing about female beauty and ecstasy since she was a teenager, but almost all of it has been wasted: years of work quietly shredded, binned, or deleted. But in April 2013 something changed, and since then her fantasies have been spilling out on her blog to a small but dedicated following. When she’s not writing, she’s working in an office, playing her guitar, running, or napping.

***

Stop Making Sense!—Nonsense Rules!

November 7, 2014November 12, 2014

NOW AVAILABLE: A special double issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW—128 pages packed with hogwash, baloney, moonshine, jive, tripe, drivel, bilge, bull, guff, bunk, bosh, BS, eyewash, piffle, poppycock, phooey, hooey, malarkey, hokum, twaddle, gobbledygook, codswallop, flapdoodle, hot air; and tommyrot. In short: UTTER NONSENSE!

Featuring art & texts by Jake Alexander, Alphonse Allais, Alain Arias-Misson, Mark Axelrod, Paulo Brito, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, Fiona Duffin, Tom La Farge, Allen Forrest, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Rhys Hughes, Janne Karlsson, Teri Lee Kline, Richard Kostelanetz, Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe, Michael Leigh, Terri Lloyd, David Macpherson, Samantha Memi, Monika Mori, Yarrow Paisley, Sheila Pell, Jason E. Rolfe, Doug Skinner, Wendy Walker, Carla M. Wilson, and D. Harlan Wilson.

BLACK SCAT REVIEW #9/10 – THE UTTER NONSENSE ISSUE
5¼” x 8¼”, Perfect-Bound. Full color. 128 pp.
$24.95 (Collector’s Edition) / $7.00 (Digital Edition) – CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Back to the Future!

November 2, 2014

VIRGO

Part Oulipian exercise, these meticulous scrapings reveal the future in all its sublime absurdity. The author approached the horoscope in his morning newspaper as if it were a puzzle, like the crossword or sudoku. By scraping out the middle part, and joining the beginning and end, he received a hidden message.

Reading outside the lines here one discovers an alternative fate more interesting than the fluff dispensed by run-of-the-mill soothsayers. Indeed, these predictions are pithy, profound, and astonishingly accurate.

In HOROSCRAPES, Doug Skinner offers up 366 clever twists of fate—something for every sign—guaranteed to alter forever how we view the universe.

Who knows what the future holds?

Doug Skinner knows.

HOROSCRAPES
by Doug Skinner
ABSURDIST TEXTS & DOCUMENTS NO. 31

$15
Perfect-bound paperback, 66 pp.

ASTROLOGY / WORDPLAY / HUMOR

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

And now for dessert . . .

October 20, 2014

EXCERPT

“Sweet and Vicious is an inspired exploration of Waldeinsamkeit and (post)romantic angst that turns the mundane into something beautiful and wild. Burns is a gifted writer.”
—D. Harlan Wilson

Black Scat Books is proud to present this innovative work of fiction by Suzanne Burns.

Sweet and Vicious is a provocative and relentlessly compelling new novel.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

___

Suzanne Burns writes poetry and fiction in Bend, Oregon (and sometimes in Paris, France). She is the author of Siblings, Misfits and Other Heroes, and Love Songs for Las Vegas, among other books. Sweet and Vicious is her first novel.

Alphonse Allais—LIVE!—On Stage!

September 15, 2014

OK, that’s hyperbole, but here’s the next best thing to Allais’s reincarnation.

Please take your seats…STANDING ROOM ONLY.

This long awaited collection of rare theatrical texts includes original translations—never before published in English—of ten monologues, three one-act plays, and twelve shorter dialogues, skits and burlesques drawn from Allais’s columns in such publications as Le Chat Noir and L’Hydropathe.

In addition to Doug Skinner’s fascinating notes on the texts, you’ll find an appendix of scarce photographs from the Paris production of “Le Pauvre Bougre et Le Bon Génie.”

Here’s a peek at the Playbill…

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