Nominata has gone missing, and her old friend Antonima is looking for her. Can the seven regulars in the Taproom help? Why are there strange lights and noises in the abandoned observatory? And what does the number 5040 have to do with all this?
Doug Skinner describes his novel as “an interactive verbal toy,” and Black Scat urges caution when handling it. On the surface, the text is playful, comic, and wayward. Further immersion, however, reveals elaborate constraints, cross references, and parallels, all creating an artificial world in which everything is a reflection of everything else, including itself. All that and slapstick too!
The lovely “Lewd, Nude & Rude” issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW has stormed the beach!
As you’ve come to expect, the issue is filled with Sublime Art & Literature — innovative fiction, eye-popping graphics, works in translation, and spicy absurdities. Featuring 131 pages packed with an international cast of contributors: Mark Axelrod; Thomas Barrett; Sebastian Bennett; Giacomo Girolamo Casanova; Norman Conquest; R J Dent; Dawn Avril Fitzroy; Eckhard Gerdes; Alexander Krivitskiy; Amy Kurman; Hélène Lavelle; Marc Levy; Olchar E. Lindsann; Clément Marot; Lilianne Milgrom; Alison Miller; T. Motley; Angelo Pastormerlo; GerardSarnat; Doug Skinner; Valéry Soers; Jean Donneau de Visé; Gregory Wallace; Tom Whalen; and David Williams.
“As with Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde, Harold Jaffe’s Brando Bleeds is the best kind of biographical fiction — perceptive, inventive, richly thematic, and truer than true. That his concisely rendered composite of Brando gives us such a full portrait of its subject is nothing short of a miracle.” —Tom Whalen
As BLACK SCAT approaches its 10th anniversary (July 4th), we’re excited to announce the publication of a major new novel by Harold Jaffe—one of America’s most innovative writers and thinkers.
BRANDO BLEEDS is a “docufictional” version of the life of renegade cultural icon Marlon Brando. Harold Jaffe seamlessly weds biographical fact and fiction, breathing new life into Brando as shaman/showman, an anti-Hollywood “movie star” whose radical politics forced him to confront the inevitable contradiction between rebel/activist and capitalist avatar. Drawn from biographical sources and Brando’s films, the author unveils Brando as a unique artist who both witnesses and introjects the world in pain.
BRANDO BLEEDS A Novel by Harold Jaffe Paperback; 181 pp., $14.95 ISBN 979-8985999655
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR HAROLD JAFFE
Each of Jaffe’s volumes has been groundbreaking. He has written some of the most innovative fiction of our time. —Toby Olson
EROS ANTI-EROS is… a wonder of deadpan humor, biting wit and visual beauty. No recent fiction has gripped me with such force and immediacy. —Marianne Hauser
From the docufictional shards of GOOSESTEP emerges a savage prophetic voice as grief-maddened as Isis picking through the bones on illusion’s killing floor to reassemble a dream that cannot be reanimated. —Patricia Eakins
As TERROR-DOT-GOV vividly demonstrates: We are spiritually imperiled by illusions masked as “news.” Omissions, slants, pallid editorials all testifying to servitude to a slavish, enslaving “text.” Harold Jaffe knows this by heart. Everywhere in Terror-dot-Gov, is exemplary skill, faultless tonality, and courage. Don’t forget courage.—Daniel Berrigan, SJ
The bravura essays in Harold Jaffe’s collection, REVOLUTIONARYBRAIN, challenge the conscience and consciousness of their readers. This witty and explosive book is an indictment of injustice and spurious morality and a call to art and enlightened activism as healing alternatives. —Jonathan Baumbach
Harold Jaffe’s SACRIFICE is an omnidirectional cry of alarm and call to action…[his] adept prose is a heart-filled and intellectualized reaction to terrestrial issues, a combination of rage, revulsion, and an implied plea for amelioration—in the fullest form of self-sacrifice. —Sebastian Bennett
“Jaffe’s convincing portraits of the dispossessed are moving, insightful glimpses of the human spirit under stress.” —New York Times Book Review
As always, Jaffe’s writing is moving, comical, marvelously deft.” —Washington Post
SACRIFICE is perhaps Harold Jaffe’s most personal book, while at the same time assaulting the assaulters of an earth in its final throes. As always, the assaults are brilliantly multi-faceted: “unsituated” dialogues, razor-sharp satire, faux-reportage, precisely cadenced rhetoric, and a deep spirit-feeling for the disappeared and dispossessed—human, animal, and plant.
Each of Jaffe’s volumes has been groundbreaking. He has written some of the most innovative fiction of our time. —Toby Olson
Harold Jaffe’s latest work, Sacrifice, is an omnidirectional cry of alarm and call to action concerning the multifarious and often extinction-level problems facing our world. In a series of insightful and often ironic short texts, ranging from docufiction tosocio-philosophical commentary and self-examination, beginning with references to Greek philosophers and meandering through the most critical issues of our day, Jaffe’s adept prose is a heart-filled and intellectualized reaction to terrestrial issues, a combination of rage, revulsion, and an implied plea for amelioration—in the fullest form of self-sacrifice, if necessary. —Sebastian Bennett
SACRIFICE Harold Jaffe A BlackScat Paperback Original 140 pp., 7.13 x 7.25 inches; $12.95 ISBN 979-8-9859996-0-0
CRITICAL PRAISE FOR HAROLD JAFFE:
From the docufictional shards of GOOSESTEP emerges a savage prophetic voice as grief-maddened as Isis picking through the bones on illusion’s killing floor to reassemble a dream that cannot be reanimated.—Patricia Eakins
As TERROR-DOT-GOV vividly demonstrates: We are spiritually imperiled by illusions masked as “news.” Omissions, slants, pallid editorials all testifying to servitude to a slavish, enslaving “text.” Harold Jaffe knows this by heart. Everywhere in Terror-dot-Gov, is exemplary skill, faultless tonality, and courage. Don’t forget courage. —Daniel Berrigan, SJ
“Jaffe’s convincing portraits of the dispossessed are moving, insightful glimpses of the human spirit under stress.” —New York Times Book Review
As always, Jaffe’s writing is moving, comical, marvelously deft.” —Washington Post
Also Available from Black Scat:
This collection of Harold Jaffe’s short, one-act plays is exceptionally diverse. The nine innovative dramas feature Billie Holiday & Lester Young; Antonin Artaud & Georges Bataille; Marilyn Monroe & Marlon Brando; Samuel Beckett; condemned prisoners in Texas making their final statement before execution; Israelis & Palestinians in life-or-death dialogue; Charles Manson unleashed; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin & Jim Morrison burning it at both ends; & the potently satirical “Splish Splash,” exploring gender discord.
Step right up! The “Funhouse” issue is now available. It walks, it talks, it crawls on its belly like a reptile . . .
Featuring astounding art and fiction by Mark Axelrod; Tom Barrett; David Berger; Norman Conquest; R J Dent; Muriel Falak; Eckhard Gerdes; Richard Gessner; Alfred Jarry; Richard Kostelanetz; Amy Kurman; Mantis; Kate Meyer-Currey; Bob McNeil; Lillianne Milgrom; Lance Olsen; Paul Rosheim; Doug Skinner; Nile Southern; and Jim Yoakum.
BLACK SCAT REVIEW 23: Wordplay Bask in the lilt & spew of vowels & consonants, the litter of letters lost & found, visual lipograms, puzzles, puns, and blazing wordplay from the KO Corral.
FEATURING: Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, Kevin Brown, Norman Conquest, Brian Coughlan, John Crouse, S. C. Delaney, Paul Forrestal, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Penelope Gerdes, Joseph Harms, Amy Kurman, Opal Louis Nations, Angelo Pastormerlo, Steve Patterson, Derek Pell, Agnès Potier, Raymond Queneau, Paul Rosheim, Gerard Sarnat, Doug Skinner, Michel Vachey, Carla M. Wilson, and D. Harlan Wilson.
A special reprint edition of BLACK SCAT REVIEW #1 is now available.
Originally published in 2012, the issue sold out quickly and has long been out of print. It features John Crombie’s translation of “Like Mother” by Alphonse Allais; a hilarious accusatory text by the legendary Canadian absurdist Crad Kilodney; collage art from the UK by Michael Leigh; Elizabeth Archer’s revealing interview with British humorist Samantha Memi; experimental comic art by Florence Bocherel; a rare comic drama by Pierre Henri Cami translated by Doug Skinner; bizarre poems from Portugal’s Pedro Carolino; and astounding short fiction by Samantha Memi, YuriyTarnawsky and Tom Whalen. (EDITOR’S NOTE: The original cover photograph by S. N. Jacobson has been censored to allow its display on Amazon.)
BLACK SCAT REVIEW (Number One) edited by Norman Conquest paperback; illustrated; full color; ISBN 979-8450666396
In Eckhard Gerdes’s fifteenth novel, two women friends — one from the city, the other from the suburbs — attend opening night of a cryptic new play: “Pissers’ Theatre.” Oddly enough, both the play and the theatre it’s being presented in have been designed to accommodate audience incontinence. Thus, the production pauses whenever someone needs to empty their bladder. This bizarre experiment plays havoc with the show’s continuity and leads our heroines into strange places — onstage and off.
THE PISSERS’ THEATRE Eckhard Gerdes Trade paperback; 112 pp., $12.95 ISBN 978-1-7357646-9-6
We are all armchair travelers now. The question is: Where do we go?
If you’re looking for answers, let 28 imaginative writers & artists from around the globe take you places you’ve never been. Find your getaway in BLACK SCAT REVIEW 21— The Travel Issue.
FEATURING: Alphonse Allais, Robert James Cross, Farewell Debut, S. C. Delaney, John Oliver Hodges, Rhys Hughes, Harold Jaffe, E.E. King, Olchar E. Lindsann, Charles J. March III, Carmelo Militano, Opal Louis Nations, Peter Payack, Persefone, Roger Pheuquewell, Agnès Potier, Collin J. Rae, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Charles de Rosières, Doug Skinner, Kristine Snodgrass, Ben Stoltzfus, Corinne Taunay, Ed Taylor, Michel Vachey, Tom Whalen, D. Harlan Wilson.
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