Forthcoming Titles:
Let’s Not Hit Each Other
Alphonse Allais
Her Three Daughters
Pierre Louÿs
Capital of Pain
Paul Éluard
Night Dreams: A Poem for Two Voices and a Secret Piano
Céline Arnauld
MAD SCATTER
Category: nostalgia
Green is the New Black
Have you seen The Book With the Green Cover?
It’s a collection of verbo-visual treats by Norman Conquest. It features posters, charts, mock book & magazine covers, rectified readymades, typographic diversions, found novels, and other detritus. It’s profusely illustrated with color plates and silverware.
Available now, just in time for summer. Be the first kid on the block to take this coffee table chapbook to the beach!
“THAT REGRETTABLE WEEKEND”
Black Scat author and translator Doug Skinner has just released his new album—THAT REGRETTABLE WEEKEND—featuring 21 songs that will make you laugh, cry in your beer, feel nostalgic for old New York and those better (some might say bitter) days that never existed. Golden vocals with traces of dark humor and a haunting uke conspire to lull one down a slippery slope.
Take a listen to the title cut:
You can purchase the full digital album for only $9, or nab your favorite tracks for a buck.
***
Watch for THE DOUG SKINNER SONGBOOK coming later this year.
A Free Holiday Gift for Scat Lovers!
The gala December issue of Le Scat Noir is available for download. And did we mention it’s free? Of course we did, but it’s worth repeating: LSN is free for all every month.
#218 features a charming Christmas story by Alphonse Allais and is packed with festive art & texts from an international roster of mischief-makers: Paulo Brito, Pink Buddha, Norman Conquest, Hans Greunke, Terri Lloyd, Frank Pulaski, Jason E. Rolfe, Doug Skinner, and Yuriy Tarnawsky.
Treat yourself to faking news, scatological fare, and those regular features we find so addictive — the monthly horoscopes, gas from the past, absurd musical instruments, and uplifting advice for folks down in the dumps.
So what are you waiting for? Click now and unwrap your gift. And be sure to share with friends and loved ones — spread the good Scat!
LSN.
It’s like SNL, only scrambled and wiser.
Happy Holidays!
The Zombie is Coming!
There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel—a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness—was published in France in 1697. It was written by one Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, “the Casanova of the 17th century,” as an act of literary revenge. It is not simply vengeful, but it’s the first work in world literature to use the word “zombie” and stands as an early example of bizarre black humor. This outrageous relic—unearthed & translated from the French by the incomparable Doug Skinner—is the novel’s first appearance in English and features a preface by the great Guillaume Apollinaire.
The Zombie of Great Peru rises from the grave this April—unleashed worldwide by Black Scat Books in an appropriately fetid trade paperback edition, with cover art & design by Norman Conquest.
Lock your doors and windows.
Back cover. Bar code not shown for your protection.
Alphonse Allais —Hip! Hip! Hooray!!!
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!
Hip! Hip! Allais!
Poet Edith Doove reading a rare edition of Allais’s Captain Cap at Plymouth Arts Centre (UK).
____
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: Black Scat Books will publish Ms. Doove’s collection Mince early next year.
.
Baffling Illuminations
Of the three modes of communicating their ideas that
human beings possess, viz., speech, gesture, and creative writing, the last one has received the least notice. Indeed, the study of hand-writing when applied to the creation of poetry and short stories is more connected in one’s mind with fortunetelling,
and other forms of popular superstition or deception,
than with scientific investigation; yet there is much to
learn by the study of insane writers.
selected pages from . . .
Wasted Energies, Baffled Thoughts: On the Writing of the Insane
by G. Mackenzie Bacon, M.D.
ABSURDIST TEXTS & DOCUMENTS NO. 16
Another great leap forward…
T.S. on American Publishers (1957)
“The way they work, they examine a manuscript for a
while and then they may say ‘Oh yes, this is like Look
Homeward Angel,’ and then they look up the sales
record of Look Homeward Angel, and if that’s all right
they’ll take it. But if the manuscript happens to be
just a bit original, you can save yourself the postage…
unless it’s five or six hundred pages, of course, then
they’re rather apt to take it, anything; they got that
idea from big cars—you know, ‘What’s good for
General Motors…by Cracky!’ ” —Terry Southern
from HOT HEART OF BOAR & Other Tastes
illustration by Norman Conquest, from Hot Heart of Boar
A touch of noir…
blackscatbooks.com 