Are we bilious? Don’t be sillious!

No bile here. Make that, NO BILE!  is here!—Alphonse Allais‘s sublime collection of absurdist texts in a new translation—first publication in English!—by the great Doug Skinner.

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Alphonse Allais’s third collection finds him in full anti-bilious form: love stories, revenge stories, monologues, short-shorts, and animal stories—all affronting the reader with startlingly modern absurdity, black humor, and wordplay.

“No Oulipian could fail to be enchanted by his essentially ironic tales, in which he juggles the rhetorical and narrative components of writing with rigorous logic and inexhaustibly zany results.”—Harry Mathews

Among the highlights are “Absinthes,” an internal monologue about the Green Fairy; “Poor Césarine,” a tale of obsessive love; and “A Good Society,” which proposes collecting used matches for the poor. As a bonus, six uncollected stories are included. PLUS illustrations and informative notes on the text by Doug Skinner.

So don’t be bilious, grab your copy now on Amazon. Start your summer off with blasts of laughter!

drawing by Doug Skinner

Here’s the original French edition, inscribed by Allais, from the collection of Vincent Maisonobe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Discover all the titles in Black Scat’s ALPHONSE ALLAIS COLLECTION

 

“TOURIST” WINS “BEST FEATURE”

Temenuga_smlCongratulations to Temenuga Trifonova—her film adaptation of her novel TOURIST has just won “Best Feature” at the Mostra Cinema Taranto film festival in Italy.  Black Scat Books is thrilled to be publishing TOURIST  in July.

TOURIST tells the mysterious story of Jack Sturrett, a book reviewer for a London literary magazine. Dissatisfied with his job, he makes an impulsive decision to leave the city without informing anyone of his departure. He boards a bus which takes him to a small town up north where he gets a job as a tourist guide after becoming so widely read in the town’s history that he passes for a local. Outside work he maintains the identity of a tourist, living in hotels and constantly reinventing his back-story. As his fake local persona becomes threateningly real, he finds himself a suspect in a murder investigation.

Screen Shot 2018-06-03 at 10.55.48 AMtourist_final_sml 2

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. Her first novel, Rewrite, was published by NON Publishing (Vancouver) in 2014. Trifonova is the author of the scholarly monographs Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (2007), and the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017) and European Film Theory (2008). She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House (France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), the New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in St. Petersburg. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Le Studium Centre for Advanced Studies in Tours, France.

[This post was corrected 6-3-18]

 

 

 

 

 

MARCO AND IARLAITH SLEPT HERE

“A writer clearly impatient with the currently devalued conventions of modern writing. His work is a fresh wind!” —Michael Moorcock

Iarlaith and Marco are father and son, living along the banks of a river in a run-down cottage. Neither is employed full-time. Iarlaith works in a foundry sorting rudimentary fonts into upper and lower cases. Marco collects trash from along the riverbank, finding flotsam and rubbish discarded by tourists who use the riverbank as  their jogging path. From this, Marco builds assemblage sculptures, which tourists buy from the local consignment shop. These are stories from their marginal existence, in which getting into trouble is as easy as doing nothing. At least they watch out for each other.

MARCO & IARLAITH
A Novel in Flash Fictions
by Eckhard Gerdes
Trade paperback, 186 pp., $12,95
Now available worldwide on Amazon

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Eckhard Gerdes has published books of poetry, drama, and fourteen novels, including Hugh Moore and My Landlady the Lobotomist. He has won an &NOW Award, the Richard Pike Bissell Award, been a finalist for the Starcherone and the Blatt awards, and was nominated for Georgia Author of the Year. His most recent books include a tongue-in-cheek work of creative nonfiction, How to Read, and a novel, White Bungalows. He is also editor and publisher of The Journal of Experimental Fiction and its associated imprint, JEF Books. He lives near Chicago and has three sons and three grandsons.

Also by Eckhard Gerdes published by BlacK Scat

 

 

Scat Hits the Fans!

JEF Books (Journal of Experimental Fiction) has just published this illustrated bibliography, compiled by Grace Murray.

“Six years of “sublime art & literature” published by the iconoclastic house of Black Scat Books is chronicled in this illustrated bibliography, featuring over 100 titles by writers, artists, and poets from around the world. This unique reference will delight collectors, bibliomaniacs and anyone fascinated by avant-garde publishing in America”

You can order a copy direct from the publisher at a discount (only $10) here.

Or you can splurge and pay the full price here on Amazon..

Drool on, bibliomaniacs, drool on.

 

Walk the Walk and Watch Your Step

Originally published by Black Scat  on January 16, 2013, this innovative collection of short stories by Alain Arias-Misson remains a popular title on our backlist. We’ve  given the book a fresh cover design by Norman Conquest.and trust it will attract new readers in search of sublime literature. Copies are available at a discount on Amazon and you can order it here.

Guaranteed to put a spring in your step!

DADA LIVES AGAIN!

On August 17 1911—seven years before Max Ernst took up scissors and paste to create his early Dada  art—WHAT A LIFE! was published in London by Methuen & Co. The authors, Edward Verrall Lucas (humorist & travel writer) and George Morrow ( illustrator and regular contributor to Punch), produced their satirical pictorial autobiography using illustrations cut from the pages of Whiteley’s General Catalogue. This inspired act of vandalism was a precursor to many works of avant-garde collage art and satire.

Long out of print in the U.S., Black Scat is proud to  bring this proto-Dada classic  back to life as #34 in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series.

WHAT A LIFE ! was  exhibited at MoMA’s 1936 “Fantastic Art, Dada, and Surrealism” show.

WHAT A LIFE! seems to have made little impression, either in England or in France, even though it has the remarkable distinction of being illustrated solely by collages drawn from the catalogue of a large department store in London (Whiteley’s), and therefore of being—as much by the images as by the text that they comment on—one of the first manifestations of that spirit we call “modern.” —Raymond Queneau, Bâtons, chiffres et lettres (1950)

What a Life!
E. V. Lucas & George Morrow

Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 34
Perfect-bound,  illustrated; 134 pages
$12
click here to grab a copy on Amazon

 

Sublime Chaps

MASKS
Alphonse Allais
translated from the French and illustrated by Norman Conquest
with an introduction and notes on the text by Doug Skinner
Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 1
Illustrated in full color; 50 pp., $12.50
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REAR WINDOWS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FIFTY FILM NOIR CLASSICS
Norman Conquest
with an introduction by Robert Wexelblatt
Absurdist Texts & Documents – No. 27
Illustrated; 70 pp., $12
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FILM NOIR REDUX

“The bible of Film Noir studies” is back in print!

This second edition of Norman Conquest‘s classic REAR WINDOWS features digitally enhanced scenes from fifty Film Noir masterpieces as you’ve never seen them before. It’s a must-have reference for thrill-seeking aficionados, students of cinema, and collectors of offbeat artists’ books. Spanning the golden age of Noir (1941-1962), it includes over 50 rare photographic stills from memorable hard-boiled motion pictures, such as The Maltese Falcon, Double Indemnity, The Postman Always Rings Twice, The Big Sleep, Out of the Past, Kiss Me Deadly, and many more. Includes an illuminating introduction by Robert Wexelblatt, Professor of Humanities, Boston University.

PRAISE FOR THE FIRST EDITION (2014)

“…the most truthful book on Noir that’s out there.” —Tosh Berman, Tam Tam Books

“I’ve just been (re)reading Rancière on the mis-en-scene revolution in theatre at the end of C19th. Here Norman Conquest goes literally beyond the mis-en-scene and adds in a Wagnerian negation of the star system. Erase glamour! Bring forward the scene makers.“—Stefan Szczelkun

“This is conceptual art at its finest. Ingenious in its simplicity, startling, absurd, and very funny.” —Alec  Burroughs

“Evocative… I like the various physical/psychological angles with which [Conquest] approaches  the stills, each of which is elegantly if sometimes surprisingly effected.” —Harold Jaffe

No. 27 in our acclaimed Absurdist Texts & Documents Series, REAR WINDOWS: AN INSIDE LOOK AT FIFTY FILM NOIR CLASSICS by Norman Conquest is available worldwide on Amazon.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER