Featuring color reproductions of never-before-seen paintings, with specifications and background details on each work. Includes an original “Surrealist Map of Belgium,” plus rare documents and archival photographs.
This catalogue is published in association with the République Surréaliste de Belgique.
With a blast of bottle rockets and puffs of Dadaist confetti, Black Scat celebrates its thirteenth b’day on July 4th. Woo-hoo! It marks the start of those rebellious teenage years, so watch out for the unexpected.
We hope you’ll join the celebration & support this independent press by ordering one of our nearly 200 sublime books.
C’mon, sing us a tune and dance like a loon!
With deep sadness Black Scat Books mourns the loss of a great writer and good friend.
“I consider myself a polygyphist: a person who is fluent in graphic linguistics. Typoglyphics is the language of phonetic and hieroglyphic (among other glyphic) forms. As Norman Conquest…points out in the recent number of his niche zine TYPO, there is so much joy to be found in dead languages, the least of which is: The reader cannot find the typos. Since my living prose is riven with typos (prior to editing), I am anxious to become expert in what Conquest calls determinative hieroglyphics.”
CLICK HERE to continue reading Steven Heller‘s take on TYPO #5—The Goddess Issue.
Start the New Year off with a bang. Give different!
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
 |  |  |
It’s an exciting time at Black Scat when we get the chance to publish a talented writer’s first book. So we’re ecstatic to announce the launch of Amy Kurman‘s collection of fiction — SHORTS.
Featuring edgy, witty, strange, & sexy short stories by a powerful new voice
This is now a BLACK SCAT BOOKS BESTSELLER!
“Those of you who have not yet met the work of Amy Kurman are in for a treat. Her debut collection is compelling, quirky, and crafted with effective attention to detail. Some passages could easily be sung for how mellifluous they are. Shorts is a compendium of compelling juxtapositions, a contrapuntal delight, but, most of all, it is the type of work that resonates in the mind long after the actual reading has ended. Kurman has the rare ability to write prose in feminine and masculine voices. Her sardonic story, ‘A Night at the Zoo,’ reads like an old black-and-white film, like something Alec Guinness or Charlie Chaplin might have done. Excellent!” —Eckhard Gerdes, author of The Pissers’ Theatre
“Don’t be fooled by the length of the affectionately bizarre stories in Shorts. A colony of dryads, a sentient Kit-Kat clock called by its wrong name, two moles in an existential marital crisis, these tropes of strangeness belie an underbelly of social commentary about the human condition that I couldn’t stop reading.
A new satirist is in our midst.”
—Suzanne Burns, author of The Veneration of Monsters
The. author at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland.
Caroline Crépiat talks about her book, Let Chat Noir Exposed: The Absurdist Spirit Behind a 19th Century French Cabaret, translated from the French by Doug Skinner.
Now available worldwide on Amazon.
As the first publisher to bring many books by France’s greatest humorist to America — in sublime translations by Doug Skinner — we are happy to share the exceedingly rare photo below. It was recently unveiled by the Musée Alphonse Allais in Honfleur (Allais’s birthplace) and donated by Nicole et Xavier Artus. It shows Alphonse with his wife, Marguerite, and daughter, Paulette, at “La Ferme de la grande cour” (circa 1896). Of the location, Allais wrote: “I go there often, to this rustic inn, half farm, half hotel; I go there to drink a glass of fresh cider, under the apple trees and even have a bite to eat when the heart tells me…”
Below, we have taken the liberty of colorizing the photograph and improving its exposure. We think it brings the image to life.
Happy May Day to Allais and to all our visitors. Help us celebrate by ordering one of the master’s collections here.
THIS POST HAS BEEN UPDATED (19 April 2022)
We recently updated two of our New Urge titles with new cover designs by N. Conquest. These handsome paperback editions are available at the links below.
Peculiar Charms
Hidden Gems: The Best of The Pearl
A second edition of Denis Diderot‘s From Their Lips to His Ear (Pocket Erotica #6) is also available. It features a delicious illustration on the flyleaf. Diderot, of course, was the highly celebrated 18th century French philosopher & editor of the groundbreaking Encyclopédie. In 1748, in need of money, he wrote this scandalous and satiric libertine allegory — Les Bijoux Indiscrets —whose hero, a sultan, is in possession of a magic ring. This exquisite little edition has been edited by Lawrence Hamilton.
CLICK HERE to order the second edition.
If you missed the recent release of two titles by the great Pierre Louÿs, be sure to check out Lips of Bilitis and A Handbook of Manners for the Good Girls of France
“Pierre Louÿs is one of the great and glorious erotomaniacs of the end of the nineteenth century.”
— André Pierre de Mandiargues
In 2016 we published The New Pleasure & other stories by Louÿs, which is currently out of print. Below, the cover (at left), and (at right) a provocative design which never appeared.
 |  |
Meanwhile, the first English translation of Alphonse Allais‘s Loves, Delights, & Organs (translated from the French by Doug Skinner) is now available. This is the thirteenth volume in our unrivaled Alphonse Allais Collection.
LAST BUT NOT LEAST…. the “funhouse” issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW has rolled into town.
Grab it HERE.
Originally published in 1894 under the title Les Chansons de Bilitis, this provocative collection of poetry was purportedly translated from the Ancient Greek but was, in fact, the product of the imagination of French poet Pierre Louÿs.
A faux contemporary of the poet Sappho, Bilitis offers the modern reader these seductive, sensual, and unashamed celebrations of female sexuality.
A beautiful book for the bedside.
LIPS OF BILITIS
Pierre Louÿs
Translated by Lono Taggers
Illustrations by Willy Pogány
Paperback; 186 pp., $14
New Urge Editions / Black Scat Books
ISBN 978-1-7379430-5-1
blackscatbooks.com 