Category: essays

BEDSIDE READING FOR THE CURIOUS

First came the groundbreaking Le Scat Noir Encyclopaedia in 2017. Three years later we launched the pataphysical classic Le Scat Noir Encyclopédie et Dictionnaire de la Pataphysique, des arts et du savoir humain: Volume Deux (in English of course). Today we’re pleased to announce a handy reference destined to become a bestseller among scholars and sex fiends: A Concise Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality — a conveniently sized paperback – perfect for beach orgies or boring church sermons. It’s a volume you’ll want to keep within reach in the bedroom or bath. And it’s guaranteed to answer all your questions. (If not, it’s packed with illustrations to ogle and drool over.)

The Encyclopedia features this distinguished panel of 23 experts of various sexual proclivities:

• Tim Anderson
• Mark Axelrod
• Tom Barrett
• Cathy Bryant
• Lenny Cavallaro
• Norman Conquest
• Rémy Dambron
• R J Dent
• Eckhard Gerdes
• Jesse Glass
• Malcolm Green
• Rhys Hughes

• Victor Hugo
• Amy Kurman
• Michael Leigh
• David Moscovich
• Opal Louis Nations
• Peter Payack
• Derek Pell
• Sourav Roy
• Jessica Ross-Dreher
• Paul Rosheim
• Doug Skinner
• Tom Whalen

AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE ON AMAZON.

TYPO #1

In this issue: Marc-Alain Barbot; Tom Barrett; Michael Betancourt; Isabelle B.L; Restif de la Bretonne; Mamie Caton; Norman Conquest; Caroline Crépiat; Art Dandy; farewell debut; Ange Degheest; Jean-Pierre Duffour; Luc Fierens; Jack Granath; Isidore Isou; Amy Kurman; Claude Nicolas Ledoux; Giambattista Palatino; Raymond Queneau; Reese Saxment; Karen Shaw; Doug Skinner; Corinne Taunay; John J. Trause; Tristan Tzara; Cal Wenby; and Femke van der Wijk.

Get in on the ground floor with this collector’s edition.

TYPO : Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, & Constrained Design
Number 1.

6 x 9 inches; 148 pp.; paperback; $14.95
ISBN: 979-8-9869224-5-4

LATEST NEWS:

Typo: Journal of Lettrism, Surrealist Semantics, & Constrained Design is the first in a promised (irregular) series of anthologies devoted to oddities of typographic design history, extending from now to the 1400s, including mnemonic devices, “Forty-Five First Letters” (they’re real!), “Surrealist Sign Language,” asemic writing, and lots more from Doug Skinner, Norman Conquest, Raymond Queneau, Isadore Isou and other contributors. Visually fun to look at and filled with interesting historical factoids about printing.
— i arrogantly recommend… by Tom Bowden,
BOOK BEAT

TYPO in PRINT

TYPO hits the top of the charts on Amazon

RAVE REVIEW

“The first issue of TYPO … has arrived at an ideal moment in the evolution of avant garde and experimental art and writing. The monuments of the 20th century avant garde such as DaDa, Surrealism, Lettrism and Oulipo are enjoying healthy interest in the digital age, inspiring the creation of new genres.TYPO provides fresh insights and perspectives on these movements.

TYPO is not another contribution to the wax museum of official culture. The editors interweave selections from what poet Ron Silliman calls the post-avant with the historic avant garde and esoteric visual-verbal examples from earlier centuries. Included are new iterations and genres in the continuum such as asemics, digital collage, neo-concrete and visual poetry as well as typographical innovations rooted in Lettrism. Accessible and highly enjoyable prose complements the flow of images.”

—De Villo Sloan, ASEMIC FRONT 2

Read the full review HERE

DUCHAMP CLEARS THE AIR!

Ahh, a breath of French air!

Marcel Duchamp‘s exile in New York, in 1915-1917, brought him sudden fame and changed the course of his career. Corinne Taunay’s lively and witty study describes the scandals of “Nude Descending a Staircase” and “Fountain,” the creation of the first readymades, and the evolution of Duchamp’s artistic strategies. With 19 illustrations in black and white and in color.

Corinne Taunay is a visual artist and art historian who has contributed to many publications in Europe and the US.

MARCEL DUCHAMP: Paris Air in New York
Corinne Taunay
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner
Paper; 50 pp., 15.24 cm x 19.05 cm; illustrated; color; $14
nonfiction
ISBN 979-8-9869224-4-7

JARRY LIVES!

Alfred Jarry spent his brief and turbulent life experimenting with genres of fiction. In his last few years, he created a new fictional form: the absurdist speculative essay. R J Dent’s new English translation of Speculations contains 68 of Jarry’s essays, originally printed between 1901 and 1904 as a series, ‘Spéculations’, in the French journal Le Revue Blanche.

In Jarry’s darkly comic collection of surrealist and satirical prose pieces, the renowned author deploys his characteristic satirical eye and dark humor to devastating effect. These essays range in tone from the wildly comic to the deeply tragic and cover a diversity of subjects, ranging from French Trees to Cannibalism. For Jarry, nothing is sacred; everything is worthy material for his surreal satire; the Passion is presented as a sporting event; buses are the prey of big game hunters, and even the Queen is licked from behind.

A series of sly investigations into fin de siècle France that reads like a beautiful & bloody
handful of paper cuts, splintered essays that turn authority on its head in sharp bursts of
wicked logic, R J Dent elegantly capturing Jarry’s iconoclastic spirit, his scandalous heart.
—Matthew Kinlin

There’s a story that Jarry carried a loaded revolver around with him (said revolver Picasso obtained after his death, and took it with him on night walks around Paris). A woman living near Jarry complained to him about the danger of his gun-toting to her children. To which Jarry said, “If that should ever happen, ma-da-me, we should ourselves be happy to get new ones with you.” If you can appreciate as demented a sentiment as that, you can have a hundred more reading Speculations, in a delightful translation from R. J. Dent. —Conor Hultman, The Local Voice

Edible contents:

SPECULATIONS
Alfred Jarry
Translated by R J Dent
Paper; 5.06  x 7.81 inches; 235 pp., $15.95
ISBN 13 979-8-9859996-1-7 

ALLAIS’S CABARET — HOORAY!

It’s a rare event when we publish a work of nonfiction, but this book is dear to our hard-hearted heart. This extraordinary work of scholarship exposes the liveliest fin-de-siècle bohemian cabaret and journal in Paris.

Le Chat Noir was a playground for painters, writers, poets, pranksters, and musicians, all gleefully demolishing the standards of art and good taste. Caroline Crépiat examines such eccentric personalities as Paul Verlaine, Alphonse Allais, Marie Krysinska, Maurice Mac-Nab, and Charles Cros, and analyzes their treatment of money, women, translation, humor, sex, disease, and scatology, with generous samplings of the original texts. A masterful look at a rich and colorful legend of the avant-garde!

Le Chat Noir Exposed
Caroline Crépiat
Translated by Doug Skinner
trade paper, 182 pp.,
Illustrated; $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-7356159-6-7

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Caroline Crépiat‘s main area of research focuses on French fin-de-siècle periodicals, humor, and language. Her articles have been published widely in France. She co-edited Masks, bodies, languages — Figures in contemporary erotic poetry (Classiques Garnier Editions: 2017). She lives in Dijon with two chats noirs.

DOUBLE YOUR PLEASURE!

It’s time to stock up for the long days ahead.

Click the covers to order on Amazon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Remember: read out the crisis, books don’t sneeze.

 

Visionary Essays

We’re excited to bring you this collection of visionary literary essays by British novelist, philosopher, lecturer, and critic, John Cowper Powys—a companion volume to our recent release of Powys on Books and Sensations. This uniform  trade paper edition features Powys’s “literary devotions” and critical essays on Rabelais, Dante, Shakespeare, El Greco, Milton, Charles Lamb, Dickens, Goethe, Matthew Arnold, Shelley, Keats, Nietzsche, Thomas Hardy, Walter Pater, Dostoyevsky, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walt Whitman.

Originally published in 1915 as Visions and Revisions, this collection stood apart from critical writing at the time and added to Powys reputation. An eccentric genius, he is best known for his mystical novels, including the extraordinary Wolf Solent which we’re preparing for publication later this year.

“Powys is still ‘the master’ to me. His words, even today, have the power of bewitching me.” —Henry Miller

CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON

LIT SENSATIONS

“English literature, like English history, teems with inspired dreamers and eccentrics: Bunyan, Blake, Hazlitt, Tolkien, and others, but none is quite as much of an all-rounder as Powys. He is as spiritual as Bunyan, as fantastical as Blake, as down-to-earth as Hazlitt, and every bit as much a fabulist as Tolkien. He is a unique necromancer of literature. He comforts and discomfits in equal measure. The word weird might have been invented just for him.” —Roger Boylan

This provocative collection features ILLUMINATING essays on some of the world’s greatest writers—Montaigne, Pascal, Voltaire, Rousseau, Balzac, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Anatole France, Paul Verlaine, Remy de Gourmont, William Blake, Byron, Emily Brontë, Joseph Conrad, Henry James, and Oscar Wilde.

Powys on Books and Sensations
JOHN COWPER POWYS
TRADE PAPERBACK, 342 PP., $14.95

CLICK HERE TO ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON