Category: book

May Day! Let the games begin!

df-launch

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.

NU-amazon

Lascivious lust and lunatic desires…

 

ap-blurb

 

A zombie rises from the grave of French literature to stalk the earth once more! This bizarre novel – written in 1697 – marks the first mention of the word “zombie” in world literature. It is a wicked tale of lascivious lust and lunatic desires, a strange concoction of prose and verse, set in the sexual and racial hothouse of colonial Guadeloupe. Our narrator has his eye on the beautiful Creole Countess, who goes barefoot and serves her guests tadpoles. When she offers him sex in exchange for magical powers, he tricks her into thinking she’s an invisible zombie; slapstick, humiliation, and confusion follow. Includes a preface by the avant-garde magus: Guillaume Apollinaire.

FIRST PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH!

Click here if you dare

 

The Zombie lurches forward, seeking readers as its prey!

z1

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!

NU-amazon

z2

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

 

 

 

The Zombie is Coming!

ZOMBIE-OF-GREAT-PERU

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.

The Zombie of Great Peru rises from the grave this April—unleashed worldwide by Black Scat Books in an appropriately fetid trade paperback edition, with cover art & design by Norman Conquest.

Lock your doors and windows.

back-cover

Back cover. Bar code not shown for your protection.

 

Spring Fever!

Capture

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

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!

aa-umb

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

am-buy

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

Sublime Poetry from Across the Pond

Mince by Edith Doove

Me a seaman’s wife
She the sea, the ocean
Me your land, your solid ground.

Or the other way around – I the sea, the ocean
She your land, your solid ground
She, the seaman’s wife.

Both of us someone’s feast
And you ours…

 

Edith DooveBlack Scat has published only a few books of poetry, so when we do it’s quite an event. This  collection of poems & observations by the gifted young British writer Edith Doove deserves a place on your shelf. Indeed, Ms. Doove has a sharp eye and her words whisper fresh visions.

These works were originally written in Dutch and composed over a ten year period.

We invite you to discover MINCE in this lovely, limited edition  chapbook.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

__
*cover photograph by the author