Category: News

Stop Making Sense!—Nonsense Rules!

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NOW AVAILABLE: A special double issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW—128 pages packed with hogwash, baloney, moonshine, jive, tripe, drivel, bilge, bull, guff, bunk, bosh, BS, eyewash, piffle, poppycock, phooey, hooey, malarkey, hokum, twaddle, gobbledygook, codswallop, flapdoodle, hot air; and tommyrot. In short: UTTER NONSENSE!

Featuring art & texts by Jake Alexander, Alphonse Allais, Alain Arias-Misson, Mark Axelrod, Paulo Brito, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, Fiona Duffin, Tom La Farge, Allen Forrest, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Rhys Hughes, Janne Karlsson, Teri Lee Kline, Richard Kostelanetz, Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe, Michael Leigh, Terri Lloyd, David Macpherson, Samantha Memi, Monika Mori, Yarrow Paisley, Sheila Pell, Jason E. Rolfe, Doug Skinner, Wendy Walker, Carla M. Wilson, and D. Harlan Wilson.

BLACK SCAT REVIEW #9/10 – THE UTTER NONSENSE ISSUE
5¼” x 8¼”, Perfect-Bound. Full color. 128 pp.
$24.95 (Collector’s Edition)   /   $7.00  (Digital Edition)   –  CLICK HERE TO ORDER

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Back to the Future!

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Part Oulipian exercise, these meticulous scrapings reveal the future in all its sublime absurdity. The author approached the horoscope in his morning newspaper as if it were a puzzle, like the crossword or sudoku. By scraping out the middle part, and joining the beginning and end, he received a hidden message.

Reading outside the lines here one discovers an alternative fate more interesting than the fluff dispensed by run-of-the-mill soothsayers. Indeed, these predictions are pithy, profound, and astonishingly accurate.

In HOROSCRAPES, Doug Skinner offers up 366 clever twists of fate—something for every sign—guaranteed to alter forever how we view the universe.

Who knows what the future holds?

Doug Skinner knows.

HOROSCRAPES

HOROSCRAPES
by Doug Skinner
ABSURDIST TEXTS  & DOCUMENTS NO. 31

$15
Perfect-bound paperback, 66 pp.

ASTROLOGY / WORDPLAY / HUMOR

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

 

Alphonse Allais —Hip! Hip! Hooray!!!

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ALPHONSE ALLAIS is the driving force (or should we say farce?) behind Black Scat Books. Allais 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.

We hope you’ll celebrate this special day with a festive drink and a few good books!

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CAP-COVER

 Hip! Hip! Allais!

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Poet Edith Doove reading a rare edition of Allais’s Captain Cap at Plymouth Arts Centre (UK).
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PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Black Scat Books will publish Ms. Doove’s collection Mince early next year.

 

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NOW PLAYING: Voodoo Sister & The Handcuffed Mind

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SCAT TRAX—the audio arm of Black Scat Books—in association with MIDNIGHT GRINDHOUSE, an experimental sound project based in Singapore, is proud to present two ‘treated soundtracks’ by artist DrG Supreme: Voodoo Sister  and The Handcuffed Mind.

These noirish concoctions are created entirely from original soundtracks of B-movie noir and exploitation flicks. We invite you to enjoy these on our Scat Trax page.

Admission is free.

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

HOROSCRAPES

Black Scat’s Absurdist Texts & Documents series is divided into sets of six titles each. This year we’ll be closing out the fifth set with AN INCONVENIENT CORPSE by Jason E. Rolfe (#30) and HOROSCRAPES by Doug Skinner (#31). Both gems are imbued with the mischievous spirit of Alphonse Allais.

Indeed, we launched the series in the summer of 2012 with Allais’s story MASKS, and the great French absurdist remains the guiding light behind Black Scat Books–suitably sublime and obscure. You’ll find plenty of evidence in the just released trade paperback SELECTED PLAYS OF ALPHONSE ALLAIS.

Next month we’re publishing a novel by a talented young writer, Suzanne Burns.

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“Sweet and Vicious is an inspired exploration of Waldeinsamkeit and (post)romantic angst that turns the mundane into something beautiful and wild. Burns is a gifted writer.” –D. Harlan Wilson.  Coming October 15th, just in time for Halloween.

Need we say more?

Artist Terri Lloyd  (THE LITTLE RED BOOK OF COMMIE PORN) returns with a new monstrosity that’s in preparation as we speak. For now, the nature of the book must remain under wraps to avoid causing  panic. We can only report that it’s another collaboration with Norman Conquest. (Clearly these two don’t know when to stop.)

The grand “utter nonsense” issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW (#9) is going to be our biggest issue yet. Publication date TBA.

Looking ahead to 2015, you’ll discover books by Mark Axelrod, Eckhard Gerdes, Alain Arias-Misson, Farewell Debut, Carla M. Wilson, Doug Rice, Richard Kostelanetz, and other luminaries.

HAPPY FALL!

Alphonse Allais—LIVE!—On Stage!

OK, that’s hyperbole, but here’s the next best thing to Allais’s reincarnation.

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Please take your seats…STANDING ROOM ONLY.

This long awaited collection of rare theatrical texts includes original translations—never before published in English—of ten monologues, three one-act plays, and twelve shorter dialogues, skits and burlesques drawn from Allais’s columns in such publications as Le Chat Noir  and L’Hydropathe.

In addition to Doug Skinner’s fascinating notes on the texts, you’ll find an appendix of scarce photographs from the Paris production of “Le Pauvre Bougre et Le Bon Génie.”

Here’s a peek at the Playbill…

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This unique collection of absurdist gems is proto-Dada at its most delicious!

Available in a trade paperback edition; 124 pp. Illustrated. $12.95

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Move over, Jarry!

Oulipo Pornobongo 3. The doors are open. . .

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Pleased to announce the 29th volume in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series: OULIPO PORNOBONGO 3; ANTHOLOGY OF EROTIC WORDPLAY.

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Featuring constrained works by Maria Schurr, Tom La Farge, Paulo Brito, Lucy Selleck, Doug Skinner, Paul Forristal, Ellen Nations, and Norman Conquest.

A titillating anthology—provocative, funny, and uncommonly satisfying.

You can order a copy in print ($15) or the digital edition ($5.25) by clicking HERE.
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Black Scat Review #8 —Seduction— Now Available!

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Here’s the one we know you’ve been waiting for. It features seductive works by Suzanne Burns, Doug Rice, Steven Teref, Kurt Cline, Charles Holdefer, Doug Skinner, Paulo Brito, Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe,Tara Stillions Whitehead, Maria Morisot, Fox Harvard, Charlie Griggs, Monika Mori, and Tom Whalen. [cover photograph by Fox Harvard]

Titillating art, photography, poetry and fiction.

70 pages, full color, perfect-bound.

CLICK HERE to order either the print edition ($16) or the discreet digital edition ($5)

BACKCOVER

If you’ve missed a previous number, back issues are available here.

Go with the flow . . .

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Black Scat Books is pleased to present David R. Slavitt‘s sublime, Nabokovian text WALLOOMSAC: A WEEK ON THE RIVER — number 28 in our flagship Absurdist Texts & Documents series. Mr. Slavitt, a writer, poet, and translator, has authored over 100 books. Under the pseudonym “Henry Suttion”  he wrote the bestselling novel The Exhibitionist which sold over 4 million copies. To list all his titles here would require a web site all its own.

WALLOOMSAC is an absurdist journey that on the surface appears to travel in one direction yet actually meanders in many. The mysterious itinerary contains one surprise after another as Slavitt’s dazzling river ripples with eddies and undercurrents. And what’s this about Thomas Crapper? Well, yes, he’s in the book, too, but don’t ask us to explain.

Poet and critic R. H. W. Dillard:

“David Slavitt has written a book about or for which it is impossible simply to write a blurb—a word, it might interest you to know, coined in 1907 by Gelett Burgess. (Did you think of a purple cow, just then?) The text itself is indescribably (deliciously?) itself. Like the Waloomsac River, it just keeps rolling along, taking the reader irresponsibly with it—laughing out loud again and again and again; marveling at its rapid wit (white water?), the wide breadths of its erudition, the dangerous shallows of its overt and covert cheekiness; marking the vertiginous depths of its, yes, wisdom. To make a long blurb short, I haven’t had this kind of significant fun since I stayed up ‘til dawn one night in 1962 breathlessly reading Pale Fire for the very first time.”

Come take a swim… the water is fine.

WALLOOMSAC: A WEEK ON THE RIVER
David R. Slavitt
Absurdist Texts & Documents No. 28

Paper, perfect-bound; 88 pp. $20.00

CLICK HERE to order.