Balzac’s WAITING FOR GODEAU was just named #1 on Amazon’s New Releases in French Dramas & Plays. Congratulations to translator Mark Axelrod.
Go Godeau!
CLICK HERE to order a copy
Category: translation
Oulipian Wordplay & Ecstatic Constraints
Pucker up your lipograms, OULIPO PORNOBONGO has arrived.
Our three, limited edition volumes of the Anthology of Erotic Wordplay are out of print and scarce. Now the complete set has been compiled into one juicy paperback edition—Illustrated in shocking full color. This is the book collectors have been drooling for.
Discover inspired works of constrained ecstasy by Alphonse Allais, Alain Arias-Misson, Paulo Brito, Norman Conquest, Rusty Cuffs, Farewell Debut, Tom La Farge, Larry Fondation, Paul Forristal, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Harold Jaffe, Roger Leatherwood, D.S. Macpherson, Samantha Memi, Ellen Nations, Opal Louis Nations, Andy O’Clancy, Lance Olsen, Derek Pell, Shane Roeschlein, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Maria Schurr, Lucy Selleck, Kebob G. Shoon, Doug Skinner, Tara Stillions Whitehead, and Giovanni Zuniga.
It’s a veritable orgy of art, text, and Oulipian mischief.
OULIPO PORNOBONGO
Anthology of Erotic Wordplay
edited by Norman Conquest
168 pages; illustrated, full color
trade paperback; $24.95
Act Now and receive…
The New Pleasure
OUT OF PRINT
This collection of seven titillating tales by the author of Aphrodite and The Songs of Bilitis, presents a sensual style with sublime erotic undertones. It includes the novella “Woman and Puppet” – a startling tale of obsessive love – which became the basis for Luis Buñuel’s film “That Obscure Object of Desire.”
“One night at the flat I sat in silent contemplation of two blue china cats that crouched upon a white table. I was wondering whether it would be better to pass the time smoking cigarettes or writing sonnets. Another idea was that it might be better to smoke the cigarettes and stare at the painting on the ceiling. Cigarette, sonnet, or stare? The most important thing at such an hour is to have a cigarette ready to hand and lip. It enshrouds all the most material things with scarves of cloud, fine and celestial. It adds something both to the lights and to the dark of the chamber, taking away the hard mathematics of the angles, and by means of a scented magical spell brings to the agitated human spirit a panacea and peace. It brings, too, the land of dreams.”
—Pierre Louÿs
Pierre Louÿs (1870 – 1925) was a French poet and writer renowned for lesbian and classical themes, as well as for explicit erotic works published posthumously. He was a gifted stylist whose pagan texts have a distinctly hypnotic power. In 1896, his first novel Aphrodite became
the most popular and best selling book of its day.
THE NEW PLEASURE & OTHER STORIES
by Pierre Louÿs
Translated from the French and Adapted by G. F. Monkshood**
Classics of Passion series
5.06″ x 7.81″ (12.852 x 19.837 cm)
224 pages, trade paper original
$14.95
___
**pseudonym of William James Clarke
A Grand Buffet!
In this sublime bilingual edition, master chef and avant-garde gourmet Richard Kostelanetz serves up a classic feast guaranteed to spark one’s mental taste buds. From the main course of a carefully carved guinea pig in the form of Gustave Flaubert’s “Dictionnaire des idées reçus,” Kostelanetz carves delicious English morsels seasoned with artificial intelligence (aka Google Translate) and his own sympathies.
GUSTAVE’S POCKET DICTIONARY is a 21st Century classic.
Trade paperback, 190 pages, 5.06″ x 7.81″
$10.95
Click here to order your copy on Amazon
A Zombie for Halloween
Bill Ectric at RED FEZ has just published an interview with Black Scat author & translator Doug Skinner. Doug talks about his translation of The Zombie of Great Peru — one of our most popular titles and perhaps our weirdest.
CLICK HERE to read the interview.
CLICK HERE to order your zombie
Surprise!
Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was France’s greatest humorist. His elegance, scientific curiosity, preoccupation with language and logic, wordplay and flashes of cruelty inspired Alfred Jarry, as well as succeeding generations of Surrealists, Pataphysicians, and Oulipians. Celebrate the master’s birthday with mirth, mischief, and cocktails!
And one of his sublime books translated by Doug Skinner, from Black Scat, of course.
Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks
Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais
“To leave is to die a little, but to die is to leave a lot.” –-Alphonse Allais
Cheers!
Theatre of the Absurd—Opening Night!
“Witkiewicz takes up and continues the vein of dream and grotesque fantasy exemplified by the late Strindberg or by Wedekind; his ideas are closely paralleled by those of the surrealists and Antonin Artaud which culminated in the masterpieces of the dramatists of the absurd—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Arrabal—of the late nineteen forties and the nineteen fifties.” -Martin Esslin
Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz (pen name: Witkacy) was desperate to get out of revolutionary St. Petersburg after the Bolsheviks seized power. Back in Poland, eager to make money and a name for himself, Witkacy began to write plays in a style that he called “Pure Form,” which foreshadowed the Theatre of the Absurd. By the time that he wrote VAHAZAR (1921), Witkacy had achieved a dreamlike dramaturgy: centered on the paranoid and crazed despot, Vahazar, and spiraling outwards through an anthill society of automatons, religious cults, and quack scientific and social theories, this play is about being trapped in nothingness.
This translation of the play by Celina Wieniewska was commissioned by Stefan Themerson in 1967, and later announced as a forthcoming title by the legendary Gaberbocchus Press. Somehow the project was sidetracked and has never appeared until this Black Scat Books publication. Paul Rosheim, publisher of Obscure Publications and scholar of Themersonia, provides a sublime introduction with biographical information about Witkacy and the story of this translation. The book also includes an appendix featuring Franciszka Themerson’s “Vahazar: A Few Suggestions for Design.”
“…Witkiewicz, Bruno Schulz and myself, the three musketeers of the Polish avant-garde.” —Witold Gombrowicz
Available now on Amazon in the U.S. and Europe.
Click here to order this masterpiece of the absurd.
you wan fower?
We’re pleased to announce the release of a new poster in the BLACK SCAT BROADSIDE series: YOU WAN FOWER? by Paulo Brito, translated from the Portuguese by Mercie Silva. It’s a vivid hallucinatory text to haunt your wall.
All posters are full color, printed on prime 80# UV-coated,
acid-free stock. 12″ x 18.”
CLICK HERE to order.
Love at First Smite
Love knows no virtue, no profit; it loves and forgives and suffers everything, because it must
Originally published in 1870, the notorious novel Venus in Furs quickly became a landmark work of erotic literature. Written by the Austrian author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (who inspired Krafft-Ebing to coin the term masochism), the book’s themes of female dominance and sadomasochism are legendary. This compact new edition features stunning collage illustrations by French artist Nelly Sanchez.
This is the first volume in the New Urge “Classics of Passion” collector’s series.
Alphonse Rides Again!
On July 4, 2012, we published Alphonse Allais’s MASKS in a limited edition of 50 copies—the first title in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series. The chapbook quickly sold out and, today, is a coveted collector’s item. Since we’ve received many requests to reprint the book, we’re pleased to announce a revised and expanded edition. Translated from the French, adapted and illustrated by Norman Conquest, this new volume also features a most Allaisian introduction & notes on the text by the great Doug Skinner. Originally published in France under the title Un drame bien parisien (1890), this darkly humorous tale is quintessential Allais—a pataphysical text admired by the Surrealists (André Breton included it in his seminal Anthologie de l’humour noir). It was also celebrated by the French group Oulipo, and has been the subject of scholarly studies by the writer and semiotician Umberto Eco, Francis Corblin, and others. 
This is the first illustrated edition of this mini masterpiece. If you missed out on our first edition, now’s you chance to own a copy. MASKS Alphonse Allais Translation & illustrations by Norman Conquest With an introduction & notes on the text by Doug Skinner Absurdist Texts & Documents No. 1 Revised & Expanded Second Edition 50 pp., perfect-bound; illustrated; Special limited launch price: $12.00 (*$14 after June 4th)
blackscatbooks.com 