from CAPTAIN CAP: HIS ADVENTURES, HIS IDEAS, HIS DRINKS by Alphonse Allais, translated from the French by Doug Skinner.
Category: Fiction
The Grand Madcap Edition of CAPTAIN CAP has Launched!
We’ve jumped the gun and released our mammoth deluxe trade paperback edition of Alphonse Allais’s CAPTAIN CAP: HIS ADVENTURES, HIS IDEAS, HIS DRINKS—translated 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.
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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
In the wings, some special things (third edition)…
Scat addicts (of which I’m one) will get their fix and kicks in the coming months. What would winter be without a stack of Scat on the bedside table? Bleak indeed. So cheer up & gear up… good reading is on the way.
On October 15th we’re releasing a limited edition of the play that may have influenced Samuel Beckett’s WAITING FOR GODOT. This deluxe edition of Balzac‘s 3-act comedy WAITING FOR GODEAU (Original title Mercodet) is translated from the French by Mark Axelrod. This launch is bound to make waves so circle the date in red.
In November, we’re publishing two Black Scat Classic Interim Editions.
First, a portfolio of cool nudes by the Austrian painter Monika Mori (known internationally as “Moo”). These dazzling abstract forms are at once playful, moody & seductive. Don’t miss MOO NUDES—a lush, erotic celebration of the female body.
Also in November, the legendary Opal Nations returns with some wicked (and we do mean wicked) visual black humor: EMBRYO WORLD. It’s sure to piss off the Right-to-Lifers and thrill the rest of us.
December, we raise the curtain on the Théâtre de l’Absurde—a limited edition of a hilarious little Patchenesque drama: ‘S A BIRD by Eckhard Gerdes. No spitting in the balcony.
Finally, for fans of Alphonse Allais, our sublime trade edition is AVAILABLE HERE.
And the praise just keeps on coming . . .
“The little book Hotel Ortolan is beautiful, both photos and text, and the photos are a special pleasure because they’re so different from the mass of digital images out there.” —Cordula Güdemann
“A new book by Tom Whalen is an event. A new limited-edition book by Tom Whalen, limited to 125 copies of which over 50 have sold in the first two days, is an event you want to get to before you turn into a bookless pumpkin.”
—Peter Cherches
“I LOVE Tom Whalen’s and Michel Varisco’s Hotel Ortolan, with photographs perfectly suited to the text. I savored it on second reading as much as I devoured it quickly on the first. I think Tom Whalen is a national (technically international) treasure!“
—Suzanne Burns
UPDATE (12/29/2013) – THIS TITLE IS OUT OF PRINT
Bon Voyage, Captain Cap
For those who may have missed our editions of Alphonse Allais‘s CAPTAIN CAP, here’s a treat: Doug Skinner‘s introduction to Vol. IV, THE SANATORIUM OF THE FUTURE:
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Dorothy Parker once remarked that most humorists “milk a formula until it moos in pain.” After so many years of turning in several columns a week, Allais may have been feeling the strain. He admitted in one piece that the punning names he used for his characters were not really that funny. In a series of rather glum installments in 1901 (July 25, July 31, August 9), he simply listed recent patent applications. Contemplating such genuine inventions as the luminous hat, the pedal-operated fan, the combination fishing pole and bicycle pump, the hail parasol, the gloves made from intestinal membranes, the multicolored cane, the sea soap, the summer fez, the metal legs for wooden horses, the powdered cheese, “etc., etc., etc.,” he could only remark, “The fantasists who think they’re so clever when they imagine a dust-catcher for submarines, or a rubber muzzle to prevent snails from dribbling on the salad, are small beer beside certain serious and licensed inventors.” Fact, all too often, trumps fiction, to the eternal despair of humorists.
Black Scat Does Balzac
Samuel Beckett’s classic absurdist play Waiting for Godot was first presented in Paris on January 5, 1953.
Flashback: Paris, 102 years earlier, where Honoré de Balzac ‘s comedy Mercadet had its inaugural performance at the Theatre du Gymnase-Dramatique on August 24, 1851.
Mercadet features a character named “Godeau” who never appears.
Hmm.
Beckett claimed he never read Balzac’s play.
We think not. Thus, next month, Black Scat Books is publishing Balzac’s three-act comedy—translated from the French by Mark Axelrod. This unique limited edition includes an unpublished letter from Samuel Beckett to the translator.
On October 15, 2013, you be the judge.
All Hands on Deck! The Future Has Arrived!
Ahoy mates! —the fourth and final volume in the Captain Cap Collection has arrived—more 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.
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..
Fall Fashions
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Hotel Ortolan
Text by Tom Whalen / photographs by Michel Varisco
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TINTIN lives!
Tintin Meets the Dragon Queen in The Return of the Maya to Manhattan is a staggering work of imagination by a major force in experimental fiction.
“The amazing palaces and pyramids that crown the skyscrapers of southern Manhattan dance fraternally with Central American jungle pyramids, the ancient Maya dance with modern intellectuals, the games of the masses and the debates of the elite, Bourbon princesses and ancestral Maya princesses, in a word a literary Apocalypse in a dance! At the start of this novel I heard resonances of the later Henry James, and in the sections on Tintin, Lewis Carroll…worthy literary companions, without a doubt! But I would like to add Samuel Beckett and William Burroughs, which does not however detract in the slightest from the originality of Arias-Misson’s style. The novel provides rare literary enjoyment and is a source of serious and enigmatic meditation.”
—Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, distinguished philosopher of Spain and novelist, author of Iluminaciones and Extravias, recently of En la red del tiempo.
The narrator and a select team of real-life friends, eminent Spanish philosopher, Ignacio Gomez de Liaño, German shamanic artist/poet, Carlfriedrich Claus, Dada erudite, Parisian Marc Dachy and the sophisticated American novelist, Walter Abish, along with assorted cartoon figures, Tintin and Captain Haddock, investigate bizarre sightings of historic Maya personages and the apparition of ghostly Maya pyramids in the streets of Manhattan. They discover that the bloodcurdling Dragon Queen and her marauding, illegitimate, campy son and S&M mate, Smoking Rabbit, who introduced bloody “axe” warfare in the Petén Peninsula in the seventh century, are pushing through the time-boundaries of ancient Tikal. The legends and exploits of the latter are bizarrely paralleled in the marital mayhem of the dysfunctional New York couple, Augustus and his (maternal) spouse. Their risky voyage into the past climaxes with the deadly Maya ball-game, pok-a-tok, in which the captain of the losing team—loses his head! And the narrator’s romance with a Maya princess is doomed.
“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, writer, composer, artist, and man of the theatre
Trade paperback on sale now in the U.S. and Europe. Click here to order on Amazon
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About the Author
Alain Arias-Misson’s nomadic character has brought him to live and work in the U.S., Belgium, North Africa, Spain, Italy, France and Central America. He currently lives in Paris and Venice. He has published six novels and four art books, and his stories have appeared in many publications such as Partisan Review, Paris Review, Brooklyn Rail, Fiction International, and Evergreen Review. His “literal objects” have been shown in museums and galleries around the world and his “public poems” enacted in the streets of a score of cities. His novel, Theatre of Incest (Dalkey Press) is currently being published in France. His collection of stories, The Man Who Walked On Air & Other Tales of Innocence is also available from Black Scat Books.
Let your inner voyeur out . . .
Finally! Our sequel to last year’s anthology of erotic wordplay: OULIPO PORNOBONGO 2 is here, featuring titillating art and texts by Opal Louis Nations, Farewell Debut, Alphonse Allais, D.S. Macpherson, Doug Skinner, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Giovanni Zuniga, Derek Pell, Roger Leatherwood, Eckhard Gerdes and others.
Here’s a sample of the delights that await you . . .
