M. Kasper will be signing copies of Kirghiz Steppes: Accumulated Verbo-Visuals this Thursday, the 25th, at 4:30 pm, at Amherst Books (8 Main St. Amherst MA).
If you’re in western Massachusetts, don’t miss this bash.
Kirghiz Steppes is a unique, limited edition album featuring the artist’s one-page pieces mixing words and pictures—parodies, comics, captioned collages, concrete poems, etc.—made since the 1970′s.
OUT OF PRINT
We know you think we’re awesome and love Black Scat Books, but do you like us? I mean really-really like us?
Well now you can prove it. We’ve just launched an awesome page over on farcebook, so please take a moment and “like” us.
Just click here and show us how awesome you are.
It would truly be awesome if all the bloggers on WordPress (who inform us daily how awesome our posts are) actually purchased some of our books. Awesome! Yes, believe it or not, we receive WP email notifications 24/7 from fundamentalists, work-at-home moms, video game entrepreneurs, auto-body parts manufacturers, big game hunters, radio talk-show hosts, et. al. Considering the nature of what we publish, that’s pretty awesome in itself.
Anyhoo… as awesome as these posts may be, our books are far more awesome—trust me.
Since we’re acutely aware of this particular post’s innate awesomeness (heck, we wrote it), there’s no need to remind us…just like us on farcebook and buy a book.
Then we’ll let you know how awesome you are.
Promise.
What’s new?
Well we’ve added “Bookends” to our navigation bar—a new page that should excite hardcore Scat-addicts seeking the inside dope. It’s a quiet place for idle chatter, gossip, and behind-the-scenes tidbits, such as notes on our cover designs, revealing author fetishes, and the key to cryptic Black Scat nomenclature. In other words, information too esoteric for the front page.
That question will be answered in the order in which it was received. But if you can’t wait that long, pick up a copy of C. S. Hibbard‘s THE OTHER SIDE: THE SHOCKING TRUTH BEHIND 100 CLASSIC PAINTINGS—just out from Black Scat.
Upon its release in the U.K. in 2009, The Other Side quickly became a bestseller. It has been translated into half a dozen languages and over two million copies have sold worldwide. Black Scat Books is honored to offer this provocative work to the American public in a new trade paperback edition—featuring 100 color reproductions, as well as a foreword by noted art historian Paul Forristal.
Includes paintings by 40 of the world’s greatest artists: Allais, Altdorfer, Bosch, Botticelli, Bruegel, Caravaggio, Chagall, Cranach, Dali, DeVries, Ernst, Giacometti, Giotto, Goya, Greco, Holbein, Klee, Klimt, Leonardo, Magritte, Memling, Michelangelo, Millet, Monet, Paolo Uccello, Raffaello, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rousseau, Rubens, Schiele, Seurat, Tansey, Uccello, Van der Weyden, Van Eyck, Van Gogh, Velasquez, Vermeer, Veronese.
Cecil Sears Hibbard is the author of the acclaimed study Art & Religion: The Bohemian Divide (2005), and a collection of incendiary essays: Leonardo’s Smile & Other Seductions (2007). His novel The Architect was nominated for the prestigious Booker Prize.
***UPDATE***We regret to announce that C. S. Hibbard has cancelled his U.S. book tour due to concerns for his personal safety. He will not be signing copies of The Other Side at City Lights in San Francisco (May 1); Book Soup in Los Angeles (May 3); Barnes and Noble / Mission Valley, San Diego (May 4). If you purchased tickets for the party at Chateau Marmont on May 6th, refunds will be provided here.
Have you had your boar today?
That is—Terry Southern‘s HOT HEART OF BOAR & Other Tastes. It’s a tasteful smorgasbord of unpublished works by the master satirist—author of the novels Candy and The Magic Christian. and the screenwriter behind such classics of black humor as The Loved One and Dr. Strangelove. This new collection is perfect-bound, wrapped in a lovely cover, and seasoned to perfection with appropriately explicit visuals by Norman Conquest. The edition is limited to 125 copies and you can order a copy right here.
Get it while it’s hot!
Climb aboard and pop your corks, Captain Cap (Vol II) sets sail today!
We recognize the inherent risks of launching a book on the first day of April, yet we’ve decided to push ahead—(or should we say shove off?)—since it’s entirely appropriate when the author is Alphonse Allais, the great French innovative humorist. Moreover, on this very day in 1897, Paul Ollendorff christened Allais’s Album primo-avrilesque (April Foolish Album)—a portfolio featuring seven monochromatic paintings which anticipated abstract art. Sadly, the album has gone unnoticed by so-called “art historians,” but we’ll leave that fight for another day.
Presently, this second volume—(two more to follow!)—gets down to the nitty-gritty, i.e., Allais’s legendary stories peppered with bizarre inventions, tall tales, philandering, and—oh yes—frequent liquid refreshments. Come to think of it, the phrase “traveling the high seas” may well have been coined in honor of the good captain’s bar-hopping.
Now’s your chance to discover a whole world of exotic trivia, such as…
And much, much more.
The Apparent Symbiosis Between the Boa and Giraffe has been painstakingly translated by the versatile Doug Skinner. who has illustrated the book with 17 original drawings done in true Allaisian spirit. He also provides an enlightening introduction and extensive notes containing historical tidbits that bring La Belle Époque alive.
At over 100 pages, this collectible edition marks a watershed moment for the Absurdist Texts & Documents series, and is one of several reasons why the word “chapbook” should be thrown overboard.
So don’t miss out on this gala voyage. Click here and order a copy.
We wish you all a happy April Fool’s! (And that’s no joke.)
On Monday 25 March, 7 pm. at McNally-Jackson, 52 Prince Street, between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, Richard Kostelanetz will present over one dozen recent books rarely, if ever, seen before, most of them extending his earlier achievements at the intersection of literature and book-art, many of them produced with the seductive new technology of “on-demand printing” and thus reasonably priced, at least for now.
Among them are Epiphanies, two vols., 1000 pages, one story to a book page, culminating thirty years of work with resonant single-sentence climax moments in otherwise nonexistent fictions, a typographical feast for a monumental project, 8½” x 11”.
Conceptual Fictions, an extended essay with examples about the framing of implicit narratives.
Visual Fictions, collecting pages designed more than a decade ago for hisOpenings and Complete Stories, along with his Leonardo and Me.
Verbal Fictions, various formally alternative narratives that are not visually enhanced.
Vocal Shorts, an expanded edition of his texts designed for live performance for various numbers of players.
Openings Short Fictions, in the tradition of Epiphanies, the initial sentences of otherwise nonexistent stories.
Reflections on Loving and Relationships, his aphorisms continuously on right-hand pages against drawings of men and women made by the prominent choreographer Frances Alenikoff.
Furtherest Fictions, which reprints, revised, an earlier collection of his exploration of radically alternative narrative well beyond what every other fictioner is doing.
A Universe of Sentences, a continuous selection of lines by others worth remembering, the whole representing a universe of experience.
1001 Stories Enumerated, single-sentence fictions that, unlike Openings andEpiphanies, are meant to be complete in themselves.
Erotic Minimal Fictions, a variety of prose alternatives constituting the apex of avant-garde erotica.
Fields/Arenas/Pitches/Turfs, which completes the publication of geometric poems—with four, eight, and sixteen words to a large book page–begun thirty years ago.
1-99: A Book, another Kostelanetz narrative, in the tradition of Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979), composed only of numerals.
Ghostories, which are fictions created by boldfacing certain letters within a single word (e.g., address).
Homophones: Stories, where narratives are composed from two or sometimes more words that sound alike if spelled differently.
To & Fro &, where the reader’s discovery of narratives depend upon turning the book’s pages.
Ops & Clos, where opening and closings words, each pair with its own typography, are interspersed amidst each other.
English, Really English, in which he collects English words that seem incredible—over five thousand of them alphabetically in several perfectbound volumes.
What I Didn’t Do, which epitomizes intellectual nonhistory as Kostelanetz’s record of proposals that were never supported.
A Book of Eyes, photocopied and velobound, which explores the richly various ways that the single letter between H and J appears in contemporary typography
His presentation may also include such slightly older books as Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia), his latest collection of mostly severe criticism; Three Poems (NY Quarterly), where his experiments with three strains of one-word poetry appear interspersed; Micro Fictions (Archae), a limited-edition hardback with 900 pages of Louis Bury’s imaginatively designed narratives all three words and less; the reprint of his classic anthology of alternative expositions, Essaying Essays (AC Books); and maybe some others.
In May, Black Scat will publish Richard’s new book The Works & Life of Kosty Richards: An American Career in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series (#15)—thus adding to this vast library of experimental fiction.
Alain Arias-Misson reading from his new collection The Man Who Walked On Air & Other Tales of Innocence at the White Box (NYC) on Saturday night. If you missed the event, don’t miss the book. You can order it on Amazon.
Literary legends Yuriy Tarnawsky (left) and Alain Arias-Misson at the Emily Harris Gallery reception last night. It was a glittering & festive evening marking Alain’s return visit to the Big Apple for a series of readings & performances (see previous post here). He holds in his hand a spanking new copy of his fiction collection, THE MAN WHO WALKED ON AIR & OTHER TALES OF INNOCENCE, published by Black Scat Books.
<<UPDATE—MARCH 16>>
Alain Arias-Misson reading from his new collection of erotic “tales of innocence” to a packed crowd at the Ukrainian Institute of America. Everyone’s talking about The Man Who Walked On Air. You can catch Alain tonight at the White Box for an “Avant-Garde Variety Show”—don’t miss It. 329 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002 | Tel: 212-714-2347.
blackscatbooks.com 