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.
Ladies and gents, grab your copy now!
THE BOOK WITH THE GREEN COVER. A collection of Norman Conquest‘s verbo-visual vices, including posters, charts, mock book & magazine covers, rectified readymades, typographic diversions, found novels, and other detritus. Illustrated with color plates and silverware.
Absurdist Texts & Documents #36
Comic artist Doug Skinner aims his poisoned pen at 52 works of classic literature—from The Iliad to Ubu Roi—whittling them down to four cartoon panels. It’s a constraint worthy of Georges Perec — an OuBapoian*collection of black humor guaranteed to set funny bones on fire.
Shorten the Classics is brilliant — albeit abbreviated — fun. If you want to read the classics, but don’t have time, this book is for you.
Grab a copy before it’s too late!
Shorten the Classics
Doug Skinner
Absurdist Texts & Documents #43
paperback; 116 pp.;
5.06 x 7.81 inches; $14
ISBN 978-1-7373711-3-7
*Oubapo: Ouvroir de bande dessinée potentielle: ”workshop of potential comic book art”)
A dead body is discovered in a boarding-house in Southampton, England. It looks like murder, but whodunnit? — howdunnit? — the room was locked!
Devised by one of the world’s greatest humorists —
P. G. Wodehouse — this witty, puzzling, impossible crime, offers all the pleasures a mystery-lover could wish for.
It makes a bloody fine stocking stuffer, too.
MURDER IMPOSSIBLE
A Locked Room Mystery
P. G. Wodehouse
paperback; 82 pp.,
4½ x 7 inches; $12.50
ISBN 978-1-7379430-7-5
**This book is only available for sale in the USA.
Inspired by Louis Aragon’s obscure surrealist text, this new adaptation by R J Dent proudly presents… [insert drumroll] the one and only, Jean-Fucque Le Cocque, a large, disembodied penis and his Parisian adventures — his satisfactory encounters with female passengers on the Metro, his small room in a hotel frequented by prostitutes, and his reason for buying a hat. (Mon dieu!)
The merry Marquis de Sade is back with another witty chapbook in our Pocket Erotica series. The Self-Made Cuckold, translated from the French by RJ Dent, follows in the footsteps of the author’s Retaliation (Pocket Erotica #17), a similarly rare work sans the notorious content he is known for. Indeed, both titles contain no savage orgies nor flagellation. These little gems are —by comparison to The 120 Days of Sodom—libertine light and amusingly smutty. There are also strains of feminism running through both books.
For those who have never encountered de Sade, it should be pointed out that he was a gifted stylist whose sentences were exquisitely crafted. Here is how The Self-Made Cuckold begins:
One of the greatest deficiencies of ill-bred people is that they constantly utter a host of indiscretion, slanders or defamations on everyone that breathes, very often in the presence of people they do not really know. One cannot imagine the number of problems that this sort of idle chatter causes: what honest man can stand by and hear evil spoken about someone he cares for without reprimanding the fool who said it?
Indeed, who could ignore such an indignity, but that’s beside the point. The purpose of the quotation is to offer you an
hors d’oeuvre, the lilt and flow of the text.
We trust you’ll enjoy this humorous little feast.
The Self-Made Cuckold
Marquis de Sade
Translated by RJ Dent
Pocket Erotica No. 20
Paper; 60 pp., $10
ISBN 978-1737371199
Did the notorious author of Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom have a sense of humor?
Indeed he did, and this short story shows a side of the author few have seen. Here is a witty, libertine tale, free of flagellation and sexual perversion. Instead, it reveals a husband’s adultery and a wife’s clever “retaliation.”
This is a decidedly feminist text and it punctures the double standard still infecting relations between men and women.
Translated from the French by R J Dent.
Comte Donatien-Alphonse-Francois de Sade
Customers in the UK can order the book here
blackscatbooks.com 