On July 4, 2012, we published Alphonse Allais’s MASKS in a limited edition of 50 copies—the first title in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series. The chapbook quickly sold out and, today, is a coveted collector’s item. Since we’ve received many requests to reprint the book, we’re pleased to announce a revised and expanded edition. Translated from the French, adapted and illustrated by Norman Conquest, this new volume also features a most Allaisian introduction & notes on the text by the great Doug Skinner. Originally published in France under the title Un drame bien parisien (1890), this darkly humorous tale is quintessential Allais—a pataphysical text admired by the Surrealists (André Breton included it in his seminal Anthologie de l’humour noir). It was also celebrated by the French group Oulipo, and has been the subject of scholarly studies by the writer and semiotician Umberto Eco, Francis Corblin, and others.
This is the first illustrated edition of this mini masterpiece. If you missed out on our first edition, now’s you chance to own a copy. MASKS Alphonse Allais Translation & illustrations by Norman Conquest With an introduction & notes on the text by Doug Skinner Absurdist Texts & Documents No. 1 Revised & Expanded Second Edition 50 pp., perfect-bound; illustrated; Special limited launch price: $12.00 (*$14 after June 4th)
Category: book launch
May Day! Let the games begin!
This collection of rousing sporting tales mashes literary history and sports lore into a satirical inferno—skewering academic jargon and postmodern analysis with a razor-sharp, poison-tipped foil. Mark Axelrod mischievously injects the ancients with steroids and offers statistics to prove how little we know about the origin of our favorite pastimes. Here you’ll discover the “Baudelaire-Bird Connection or, How the Boston Celtics Got To Be That Way”; the obscure “Russian Sport of Face Slapping”; “Metaleptic Parabasis or, the Fine Art of High Jumping”; “Jai-Alai Machu Picchu,” and many other strange feats of Physical Lit-ness.
Armed with these wickedly funny tales you can head to the nearest sports bar or poetry reading and laugh your ass off.
DANTE’S FOIL & OTHER SPORTING TALES is a Black Scat Gold Medal Finalist.
Friends of Black Scat Books dig this…
“Derek Pell spins words like flaming yarn from a berserk spindle. Burroughs would be proud of this one . . . but Pell’s voice is entirely his own. Naked Lunch at Tiffany’s is a true work of literature.” –D. Harlan Wilson, author of Primordial: An Abstraction
The Zombie lurches forward, seeking readers as its prey!
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!
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!

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
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

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
“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!

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.

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!
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!
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












