Charles Baudelaire’s decadent erotic poems caused a scandal when they first appeared in 1857. Both author and publisher were prosecuted for unveiling works that were “an insult to public decency,” and six poems in the collection were suppressed. These so-called indecent works (banned in France until 1949) were: Lesbos; Condemned Women: Delphine and Hippolyta; Lethe; To One Who Is Too Happy; Jewels; and The Metamorphosis of the Vampire— and all are included in this Pocket Erotica edition, plus 20 more.
Selected Erotic Poems Charles Baudelaire Translated from the French by R J Dent Pocket Erotica No. 21, New Urge Editions paper chapbook; 64 pp., $12 ISBN 978-1737943037
The merry Marquis de Sade is back with another witty chapbook in our Pocket Erotica series. The Self-Made Cuckold, translated from the French by RJ Dent, follows in the footsteps of the author’s Retaliation (Pocket Erotica #17), a similarly rare work sans the notorious content he is known for. Indeed, both titles contain no savage orgies nor flagellation. These little gems are —by comparison to The120 Days of Sodom—libertine light and amusingly smutty. There are also strains of feminism running through both books.
For those who have never encountered de Sade, it should be pointed out that he was a gifted stylist whose sentences were exquisitely crafted. Here is how The Self-Made Cuckold begins:
One of the greatest deficiencies of ill-bred people is that they constantly utter a host of indiscretion, slanders or defamations on everyone that breathes, very often in the presence of people they do not really know. One cannot imagine the number of problems that this sort of idle chatter causes: what honest man can stand by and hear evil spoken about someone he cares for without reprimanding the fool who said it?
Indeed, who could ignore such an indignity, but that’s beside the point. The purpose of the quotation is to offer you an hors d’oeuvre, the lilt and flow of the text.
We trust you’ll enjoy this humorous little feast.
The Self-Made Cuckold Marquis de Sade Translated by RJ Dent Pocket Erotica No. 20 Paper; 60 pp., $10 ISBN 978-1737371199
Harold Jaffe‘s new collection, Strange Fruit & Other Plays,challenges the reader to confront an America awash in racism, hatred, and violence. With cunning precision, Jaffe employs 20th century icons of art, cinema, music, & literature, to illuminate the dark place we find ourselves in today.
Here are nine diverse and innovative one-act plays, featuring Billie Holiday & Lester Young; Antonin Artaud & Georges Bataille; Marilyn Monroe & Marlon Brando; Samuel Beckett; condemned prisoners in Texas making their final statement before execution; Israelis & Palestinians in life-or-death dialogue; Charles Manson unleashed; Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin & Jim Morrison burning it at both ends; & the potently satirical “Splish Splash,” exploring gender discord.
Harold Jaffe is the author of 30 novels, short fiction collections, essays, and plays. His recent books include Porn-anti-Porn and BRUT: Writings on Art & Artists. He is editor-in-chief of Fiction International.
So begins this mesmerizing tale by a gifted young writer: Su Orwell. Her unique style, laced with edgy humor, makes ESCAPE ARTISTS a memorable work of contemporary erotic fiction. It is the story of a married woman, Susann, who encounters the charismatic Arjan online. What begins as an internet flirtation soon evolves into an unusual affair — a fantasy escape becomes a reality of intense pleasure, taking Susann far from her suburban comfort zone.
Su Orwell’s debut novel, Edge of Sundown, was published by Darkstroke Books in 2020. Her short prose and essays have appeared in Write City Magazine, Writing Disorder, Raconteur, and The New Urge Reader 4, among others. She lives in Chicago.
Black Scat author Tom Whalen’s acclaimed novel, The Straw That Broke, has been filmed in Germany. It is screening in competition at the 55th Hof International Film Festival on Oct. 27, 29.
We don’t have a clue what it is to be male or female, or if there are intermediate genders. Male and female might be fields which overlap into androgyny or different kinds of sexual desires. But because we live in a Western, patriarchal world, we have very little chance of exploring these gender possibilities. —Kathy Acker
After (mis)reading Don Quixote, a boy transforms himself into “Janey Smith,” a character he glimpsed in Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School. The unnamed Catholic narrator wanders the streets of Pittsburgh, slipping in and out of gender roles, seducing men and women — erasing his sense of his own flesh. Sex and gender are joined in Janey—a dream—who becomes an atheist of desire, on a quest to become an imperceptible shadow.
Doug Rice (author of Here Lies Memory) channels Kathy Acker in this elegiac prose poem which will haunt the reader like a strange, erotic dream.
JANEY QUIXOTE Doug Rice Pocket Erotica No. 18 New Urge Editions 67 pp., $10; paper ISBN: 978-1-7373711-8-2
Doug Rice is the author of When Love Was, Here Lies Memory, An Erotics of Seeing, Das Heilige Buch der Stille, Faraway, So Close, Between Appear and Disappear, Dream Memoirs of a Fabulist, Blood of Mugwump, and other books of fiction, photographs, and memoir. His work has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including Zyzzyva, Gargoyle, Discourse, and Fiction International. He was a Literary Fellow at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart, Germany, 2012-2014. He is the publisher of Nobodaddies Press, which will be reappearing in 2022.
There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel — THE ZOMBIE OF GREAT PERU — is a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness — 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.
Did the notorious author of Justine and The 120 Days of Sodom have a sense of humor?
Indeed he did, and this short story shows a side of the author few have seen. Here is a witty, libertine tale, free of flagellation and sexual perversion. Instead, it reveals a husband’s adultery and a wife’s clever “retaliation.”
This is a decidedly feminist text and it punctures the double standard still infecting relations between men and women.
blackscatbooks.com 