Order or Chaos?

April 8, 2014April 8, 2014

Jules Torquemal is a middle-aged civil servant in the Ministry of Education living shortly before the First World War blew up the Belle Époque. His life is settled and his hobby is philosophizing of the complacent variety. One day, told by an indignant friend of a petty injustice, Torquemal finds questions he had thought long closed re-opening and the ground slipping beneath him. The world he believed morally moored and logically consistent suddenly appears to him anything but.

The Derangement of Jules Torquemal by Robert Wexelblatt is a wickedly clever (and haunting) philosophical puzzle.

This Black Scat Classic Interim Edition is limited to 100 copies. CLICK HERE to order

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Robert Wexelblatt is professor of humanities at Boston University’s College of General Studies. He has published essays, stories, and poems in a wide variety of journals, two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, a book of essays, Professors at Play, and a short novel, Losses. His novel, Zublinka Among Women, won the Indie Book Awards First Prize for Fiction.

Coming Attractions

April 6, 2014May 1, 2014

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REAR WINDOWS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FIFTY FILM NOIR CLASSICS
ON SALE NOW!

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MUD BATH by Allan Bealy
ON SALE NOW!

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THE UNKNOWN ADJECTIVE by Doug Skinner
Coming June 11th

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SELECTED PLAYS OF ALPHONSE ALLAIS
Coming July 9th

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OULIPO PORNOBONGO 3: ANTHOLOGY OF EROTIC WORDPLAY
Coming July 30th

Class Struggle, Wordplay, & Derring-do!

March 11, 2014

Each line that Judson Hamilton invents carbonates your imagination to the point where your brain spills over in a waterfall of fizzy synapses.”
—Carl Annarummo, Greying Ghost Press

Cover art and design by Ievgen Kharuk

The Count of Monty Christo meets Monty Python in this wickedly funny experimental novella. Will Morel and Valentine usurp their respective masters in time for a happy ending? Judson Hamilton‘s tale of class struggle appropriates the language of 19th century literature and turns it against itself. Rad, indeed!

Available in a limited print edition of 150 copies as well as a digital version

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

READING IN TRANSLATION reviews SURREALIST TEXTS

February 25, 2014January 13, 2024

Falling somewhere between short stories and prose poems in fluid translation by Ellen Nations, Surrealist Texts is an indispensable introduction to this fascinating writer.

—Lucina Schell, READING IN TRANSLATION

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“Nations’s translations admirably resist the urge to clarify or normalize Prassinos’s surrealist prose. Complemented by Bruce Hutchinson’s beautiful watercolors in a limited edition of only 85 copies, Surrealist Texts makes a lovely gift for connoisseurs of surrealism. But the significance of this collection extends beyond its historical value. Like most surrealist literature, the stories are strange and even off-putting on the surface, but plumbing their depths reveals repressed truths, hidden within the subconscious, that are no less painful or true than when they were written.”

Read the complete text of Schell’s glowing review at the link below:

http://readingintranslation.com/2014/02/25/bleak-fairy-tales-gisele-prassinoss-surrealist-texts-translated-by-ellen-nations/

THIS LIMITED EDITION IS OUT-OF-PRINT.

BLACK SCAT REVIEW #6 is Available!

February 23, 2014February 25, 2014

BLACK SCAT REVIEW features innovative fiction, art, interviews, and works in translation.

In this issue: Nin Andrews, Emily June Brink, Eckhard Gerdes, Michelle Gray, Judson Hamilton, Sarah Katharina Kayß, Adam Miller, Ivan de Monbrison, Jules Moy, Opal Louis Nations, Doug Skinner, Brett Stout, Joanna C. Valente, and Sayuri Yamada. PLUS an extensive interview with Yuriy Tarnawsky on the release of The Placebo Effect Trilogy.

Full color book format — 78 pages — Perfect-bound ($18.00).

Also available in a digital edition ($5.00).

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

The #2 Bestseller!

February 4, 2014July 13, 2022

THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT

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Praise for MERDE À LA BELLE ÉPOQUE

“BLACK SCAT BOOKS has launched from the pits of lit this shameful little anthology, wonderfully translated and prefaced with futile brilliance by Doug Skinner. I was immediately disgusted and attracted by these turn-of-the-century French luminaries indulging in dirty little boy lyrics and lunatic stories, many of them in the scatological society that hung out at Le Chat Noir…” —Alain Arias-Misson, author of Theatre of Incest

“Incroyable!… Alfred (a fart man from way back) Jarry would surely relish this collection–one which combines force-feeding with delicate odoriferous leakage—something for every taste!” —Nile Southern, author of The Candy Men: The Rollicking Life and Times of the Notorious Novel Candy

“These dirty little secrets are canonical secretions of literary genius. Fin de siecle Parisian scatology at its best.” —D. Harlan Wilson, author of Hitler: The Terminal Biography, Freud: The Penultimate Biography, and Douglass: The Lost Autobiography

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This hilarious scatological anthology features stories, a song, poems, a play, a rebus, and naughty jokes by period luminaries. Contributors include Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, Edmond Haraucourt, Vincent Hyspa, Maurice Mac-Nab, and Erik Satie.

The collection has been tastefully compiled and effervescently translated from the French by Doug Skinner.

This limited edition includes notes on the translations and a brief biography of each contributor.

#2 on our Bestseller List— don’t settle for #1!

Merde à La Belle Époque
Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 24
Perfect-bound chapbook, 48 pp.
Limited to 310 copies. – $12.50

*A discreet digital edition is also available ($7.50)

Happy Birthday, Rabelais!

In the wings, some special things (fifth edition)…

January 27, 2014March 19, 2014

The Derangement of Jules Torquemal
by Robert Wexelblatt

“The best thing would be for me to go away. Everyone says so: Geneviève, Emmanuelle, Dr. Strouville; no doubt the milkman, the President of the Republic, and the Pope in Rome agree. The Minister might allow me a couple of weeks, but he’s been looking at me strangely of late, furtively but with intensity, as if trying to peer inside my skull and make a proper survey of the bleak thoughts to be found there…”

A daunting philosophical puzzle.

Black Scat Classic Interim Edition – No. 07
Publication: April 9

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Mud Bath
by Allan Bealy

“At last, an album of Bealy’s edgy, layered, elegant collages. Incisive, in both senses.”
– Michael Kasper

“Allan Bealy is a collagist with a profound knowledge of the form’s history, as well as art history—period. With a vision that’s wide-ranging but cohesive, he’s one of those artists who can serve up a banquet of images in seemingly disparate styles, yet you’ll always know who cooked them up. Dig in to this delectable feast for the eyes, but take the time to savor each course.”
– Peter Cherches, author of Lift Your Right Arm

Black Scat Classic Interim Edition – No. 08
Publication: May 14

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Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner

Rare theatrical works by the great French humorist.

Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 28
Publication: July 9

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And more to come.

Surrealism Lives!

January 8, 2014November 9, 2020Leave a comment

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We start the New Year off with a stunning collection of texts by Gisèle Prassinos—one of surrealism’s most gifted voices.

Prassinos was discovered at age 14 by André Breton who included her poetry in his seminal Anthologie de l’humour noir (1940). Breton commented: “The tone of Gisèle Prassinos is unique: all the poets are jealous of it.” Indeed, her haunting, childlike style remains unrivaled and her stories timeless.

Exquisitely translated from the French by Ellen Nations, this limited edition includes 20 transformative texts, plus eight original watercolor paintings by the artist Bruce Hutchinson. spread

That half the works in this collection were written when Prassinos was just fourteen and fifteen is evidence of how rare a prodigy she was. The surrealist’s sense of the word marvelous certainly applies to these strange creations.

Here is a taste of the text “Filial Devotion”…

He now found himself in the middle of a large lake where furniture made of mahogany, spruce and rosewood swam.Young girls in their panties gently fought each other by now and again blowing on their flushed arms.The man believed he recognized one of his daughters. But thinking it was only a hallucination, he retreated by swimming up to the adjoining door.There, he found himself in the presence of a very large and hairy stag.The stag’s eyes slowly became bigger and bigger as they gradually feasted on his whole egg-shaped face.

Only 85 copies are available for purchase.

OUT OF PRINT

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Ellen Nations, translator and photographer, grew up in Norway and has for many years made her home in the San Francisco Bay Area where she lives with her husband Opal Louis Nations. Together they published the experimental literature and art magazine Strange Faeces. In addition to her translations of Gisèle Prassinos, she has translated works by Alain Jouffroy, Paul Nougé, Raymond Radiguet, Joyce Mansour and others.

Bruce Hutchinson created the watercolor paintings in Surrealist Texts while in his mid-20s as part of his weekly correspondence with Opal and Ellen Nations. He wrote his letters on small pieces of paper with ink drawings on one side, original watercolors on the other. His artwork has appeared in many small press publications.

Poem for the Holidays

December 27, 2013December 27, 2013Leave a comment

If you missed the gala Captain Cap launch party last month at The Jalopy Theatre in Brooklyn, you’re in luck. We’ve prepared two video excerpts featuring Doug Skinner reading from his translation of Alphonse Allais’s masterpiece.

In the first video, Doug reads “The Chameleon Child“—one of the good Captain’s rare poems.

In the video below, Captain Cap gives a masterful lesson in savoir-faire to an ignorant, European, and dimwitted bartender.

Finally, if Santa in his dotage neglected to leave a copy of CAPTAIN CAP under the tree, you can treat yourself to one here.

Tintin Rules

December 21, 2013December 29, 2013Leave a comment

“Fusing cultural milieus continents and millennia apart, Alain Arias-Misson defies gravity as well as time and geography in this brilliant phantasmagorical novel. I was hanging on to my disorientation on every page of Augustus Sykey and his childhood cartoon sidekick Tintin’s thrilling odyssey through the ritual crimes and erotic depths of a Manhattan dreamscape.” —William Niederkorn

TINTIN

Augustus pivoted on his knees and scuttled back down the Pyramid in order to intercept this childhood hero lookalike, and even so, with his head lower than his posterior as he hurried on the downward slope, he experienced no pull from gravity, the inclined plane of the Pyramid’s surface maintaining all the characteristics of a horizontal. And as he caught up with the odd-looking personage below, the latter glanced up with that perfect 0 of a face, empty except for the pin-pricks of eyes and stubby turned-up nose and taut line of a mouth, his expression not one of pleased recognition but of utter disbelief. Eye-contact was brief, a shock of recognition, and he realized the young man before him actually was the real Tintin—or better, the unreal Tintin. However real Tintin had always appeared to him, his appearance here was out of the question—some fraud, some masquerade. And the same dismissal of his presence was evident in Tintin’s eyes.

Trade paperback on sale now in the U.S. and Europe. Click here to order