The Grand Madcap Edition of CAPTAIN CAP has Launched!

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We’ve jumped the gun and released our mammoth deluxe trade paperback edition of Alphonse Allais’s  CAPTAIN CAP: HIS ADVENTURES, HIS IDEAS, HIS DRINKStranslated by Doug Skinner. This is the complete & unabridged edition of the original 1902 French classic. 370 pages, including  eight uncollected “Captain Cap” stories, plus a “Cappendix” of rare historical pictures.

The book is profusely illustrated with witty drawings by Doug Skinner, in addition to his extensive notes on the translation and swashbuckling  introduction.

If you missed any of the limited edition capsized Captain Cap chapbooks in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series, you can get the whole kit and caboodle now, plus oodles more.

ORDER YOUR COPY ON AMAZON

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ALPHONSE ALLAIS (1854-1905) was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination. In addition to composing absurdist texts for newspapers such as Le Chat Noir and Le Journal, he 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). Truly ahead of his time (as well as ours), Allais is needed now more than ever. His mischievous work remains fresh, funny, and always surprising.

DOUG SKINNER has written numerous scores for theater and dance, particularly for actor/clown Bill Irwin (The Regard of Flight). His articles, cartoons, and translations have appeared in The Fortean Times, Fate, The Anomalist, Nickelodeon, Weirdo, Black Scat Review, and other periodicals. His translation of Isidore Isou’s Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara was published by Black Scat Books.

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ARE YOU IN THE UK? CLICK HERE TO ORDER

ARE YOU IN FRANCE? CLICK HERE TO ORDER

ARE YOU IN GERMANY?  CLICK HERE TO ORDER

There’s no government, but at least there’s still Art…

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Pamper them with oils, swaddle them in the spoils of war. Watercolors, pastels, collage, découpage, gouache and the glory of riches. Feed their pointy little heads with the visions of well-heeled contemporary masters. Shower them with glitter from the gods. Smother them in dark museums and galleries. Clobber the slobbering blobs with sculpted urns, lash them with brushes dripping illusions. Give them the gift of fab, fame and fortune! Bestow upon them this Fun and Profitable Activity Book by one of Italy’s greatest living  artists—Peppo Bianchessi.

RICH KIDS

CONTEMPORARY ART FOR RICH KIDS is a full color, illustrated guide to modern rat and the wonders of creation’s maze. Let the kiddies ogle, spit, guffaw and squirm as they learn and play. Remember: rich kids represent the future of the planet. These little amorphodytes are our future landlords & banksters; they are budding mobsters, jihadis, politicians, investors, meth-heads and speculators. They were born to remake the world spin in their own greedy image.

Spoil them now while there’s still time. Give them something to do. Or read it yourself. It’s the breakfast of Duchampions.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER this luxurious little book of dreams.
A Black $cat Scholastic Classic.

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ABOUT THE ARTIST:

PEPPO2Peppo Bianchessi is a multimedia artist from Italy. He is a “mittel-European”, a  funny intellectual strongly influenced by Japanese culture. In Italy, Multimedia Artists have been around since the Renaissance and, before Apple Computers and multi-tasking, they were simply called Renaissance Men. When he was 20, Peppo went to the Venice Art Biennale for the first time. He was surprised to see that some of the so-called “young artists” were over 50. Recently he returned to Venice and discovered some teenagers were considered “young artists.” Peppo is now 45 years old and has never been a young artist. And it’s probably too early to consider him an Old Master, but he’s working on it. That is, to become old, not a Master. On many occasions he has tried to be a contemporary artist, but his timing was always wrong. Thus, he has accepted his real vocation: undermining the education of children (and adults) through funny and provocative books.

Contemporary Art For Rich Kids is his first book to be published in the United States.

All Hands on Deck! The Future Has Arrived!

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Ahoy mates! —the fourth and final volume in the Captain Cap Collection has arrivedmore madcap tales by the great French absurdist, Alphonse Allais. His hard-drinking, philosophizing, womanizing, & pioneering Captain Cap sails again to some hilariously strange shores. The pun-filled text has been brilliantly translated (and profusely illustrated) by Doug Skinner—and includes a penetrating preface and extensive notes on the text.

If you’ve never heard of “crocodile bridges” or “smell-buoys”, then you simply must read this  literary landmark—the first English translation of  “…one of the great masterpieces of humorous literature.”nooSFere Littérature.

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Come on in, the water’s fine…

CLICK HERE TO ORDER A COPY OF THIS LIMITED EDITION

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PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Volumes I – III are out of print..

 

Captain Cap Rides Again!

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Hang on to your caps, folks, the Captain is back in a capsized edition designed to teaseVolume III in our hilarious 4-volume series.

Captain Cap: The Antifilter & Other Inventions by Alphonse Allais, translated and illustrated by Doug Skinner. This literary landmark is the first publication in English featuring Allais’s hilarious, booze-cruising captain of the high seasthe unthinkably unsinkable Captain Cap.

Over 100, profusely illustrated pages, The Antifilter is packed with strange, pataphysical inventions, quirky cons, cocktails, wordplay and absurd pranks. In short, it’s a feast for landlubbers and lover’s of French lit & humor.

DISCOVER:

  • a new way to give microbes what they deserve
  • a successful ascension, without a craft
  • a machine that travels 234 kilometers an hour
  • the secret of a truly modern house
  • the art of shoeing horses on the Australian pampas
  • a strange theory on the formation of coal

 and much, much more!

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110 pages, perfect-bound. Limited to 125 copies. $21.50

CLICK HERE and climb aboard.

M. Kasper Pub Party at Amherst Books

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M. Kasper will be signing copies of Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo-Visuals  this Thursday, the 25th, at 4:30 pm, at Amherst Books (8 Main St. Amherst MA).

If you’re in western Massachusetts, don’t miss this bash.

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Kirghiz Steppes is a unique, limited edition album featuring the artist’s one-page pieces mixing words and pictures—parodies, comics, captioned collages, concrete poems, etc.—made since the 1970′s.

OUT OF PRINT

Book Worship

rkOn 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 Epiphaniesthe 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.

Live from New York…

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Literary legends Yuriy Tarnawsky (left) and Alain Arias-Misson at the Emily Harris Gallery reception last night. It was a glittering & festive evening marking Alain’s return visit to the Big Apple for a series of readings & performances (see previous post here). He holds in his hand a spanking new copy of his fiction collection, THE MAN WHO WALKED ON AIR & OTHER TALES OF INNOCENCE, published by Black Scat Books.

<<UPDATE—MARCH 16>>

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Alain Arias-Misson reading from his new collection of erotic “tales of innocence” to a packed crowd at the Ukrainian Institute of America. Everyone’s talking about The Man Who Walked On Air.  You can catch Alain tonight at the White Box for an “Avant-Garde Variety Show”‏—don’t miss It.   329 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002 | Tel: 212-714-2347.

Tzara in London

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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

tzara2photos courtesy of Frédéric Acquaviva