FUN & GAMES & OULIPIAN FICTION

standinAUTOBIOGRAPHY-COVER

As the summer heats up, Black Scat offers two treats—a grand anthology and a stunning new novel by Alain Arias-Misson.

Pucker up your lipograms, OULIPO PORNOBONGO has arrived. The three limited edition volumes of this “Anthology of Erotic Wordplay” are out of print and scarce. Now the complete set has been compiled into this juicy paperback edition—Illustrated in shocking full color. 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. OULIPO PORNOBONGO is a veritable orgy of art, text, and Oulipian mischief.   CLICK TO ORDER

Discover what happens when famous fictional characters surface in the life of a writer. AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHARACTER FROM FICTION is an extraordinary work of Oulipian imagination. Alain Arias-Misson has produced an indecently literary novel about a thoroughly picaresque Character. Passages have been plagiarized from a score of great Modernists — from Kafka and Stendhal to Joyce, Austen and Proust, from Strindberg, Constant and Mann to Michaux, Sterne and Beckett, and are woven seamlessly, unidentified, into his “autobiography.” For the Character — a budding author — is the product of those authors whose novels he has been nourished on. Characters step out of their fiction to advise and interfere with his life and he appears on stage in theirs. Where ‘le petit Marcel’s’ nocturnal terrors begin and the Character’s end, or how the Character’s boyhood lusts lead him into the Brussels labyrinth of ladies of the night and how he meets young Daedalus there, already sated in a lady’s embrace, is an open question. The autobiography ends at the age of twenty-one, when like most authors he has read his own most important authors — yet the rest of his life has already been plotted.
CLICK TO ORDER

Let the games begin!

A U T O B I O G R A P H Y OF A CHARACTER FROM FICTION

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Discover what happens when famous fictional characters surface in the life of a writer.

Alain Arias-Misson has produced an indecently literary novel about a thoroughly picaresque Character. Passages have been plagiarized from a score of great Modernists — from Kafka and Stendhal to Joyce, Austen and Proust, from Strindberg, Constant and Mann to Michaux, Sterne and Beckett, and are woven seamlessly, unidentified, into his “autobiography.” For the Character — a budding author — is the product of those authors whose novels he has been nourished on. Characters step out of their fiction to advise and interfere with his life and he appears on stage in theirs. Where le petit Marcel’s nocturnal terrors begin and the Character’s end, or how the Character’s boyhood lusts lead him into the Brussels labyrinth of ladies of the night and how he meets young Daedalus there, already sated in a lady’s embrace, is an open question. The autobiography ends at the age of twenty-one, when like most authors he has read his own most important authors — yet the rest of his life has already been plotted.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHARACTER FROM FICTION is an extraordinary work of Oulipian imagination.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

***

self-portrait with toastABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alain Arias-Misson is another character from a fiction by Alain Arias-Misson. He was born in Brussels, grew up from age four in New York,  Greek Literature and philosophy at Harvard, led a nomadic life throughout Europe, North Africa and New York. Lives in Paris and Venice. This is his ninth novel. In Europe he is known for his Public Poems in a dozen cities, and also New York and L.A., as well as his 3D poetry which has been shown in hundreds of galleries and museums around the world. On the other hand, little is known of the author.

Other Black Scat Books by Alain Arias-Misson

Comic Book: A Novel

The Man Who Walked On Air & Other Tales of Innocence

Tintin Meets the Dragon Queen in The Return of the Maya to Manhattan

 

Summer Scatterings

balzac_orderJULY HAS BEEN A BUSY MONTH here at Black Scat. We  added Balzac’s comedy WAITING FOR GODEAU, translated by Mark Axelrod,  to our growing list of theatrical works, with the emphasis on farce and the Theatre of the Absurd—plays by D. Harlan Wilson, Eckhard Gerdes,  Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz,  and Alphonse Allais. Avant-garde drama is alive and well here.

Now #1 on Amazon’s  New Releases in French Dramas & Plays

We compiled three out-of-print volumes from our Absurdist Texts & Documents standinseries in a trade paperback edition —OULIPO PORNOBONGO: ANTHOLOGY OF EROTIC WORDPLAY. This illustrated anthology features works by 28 writers and artists from around the world, including 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. Fans of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle will enjoy these works of constrained ecstasy.

scatonlineLater this month we’re launching a monthly page of fiction and poetry—digital works that are not available in print. This will provide an additional venue outside our print magazine, Black Scat Review, which is issued irregularly.

AUTOBIOGRAPHY-COVERThe summer heats up in August with release of a new novel by Alain Arias-Misson; AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF A CHARACTER FROM FICTION. This innovative work of experimental fiction  integrates plagiarized texts by Joyce, Beckett,  Kafka, Proust, Strindberg, Michaux,  Sterne, Lewis Carroll and others into an ingenious fictional “autobiography.”  Here you’ll discover what happens when famous fictional characters surface in the life of a writer.

 

Looking ahead to the fall, we’ll release the much anticipated new novel by Doug Rice—HERE MEMORY-FRONT---WEBLIES MEMORY: A PITTSBURGH NOVEL, which explores the place of memory in living, daily, scarred and sacred lives. Two Pittsburgh families struggle to survive trauma and love. A man wills himself to go blind, not to forget, but to remember in new ways. Another man drinks beer after beer until he can no longer drink away what he must face directly. This novel reveals what language and photographs do to memory, desire, and love, and what gentrification is doing to the souls of families and neighborhoods.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR HERE LIES MEMORY:

“…Doug Rice loves his characters wondrously, keenly, completely, and the result is a novel at once stunningly beautiful, brilliant, fierce, crazily imaginative, and acutely wise about how the ghosts that our memories and words invent are often the last things to leave us, no matter what, how some stay so deep in our skin they become as real as its color — especially those that can damage and mend us most.” —Lance Olsen, author of THEORIES OF FORGETTING

“Covering all of the bases in this novel bent on conveying a deep love for the city and the people of Pittsburgh, Doug Rice ultimately makes our lives feel more dignified, loved, no matter if our local language and essence of being have become displaced. I’ve got no words for what Rice accomplishes. Just that, he beautifully brings to light everything in The ‘Burgh – and in places of the heart – that was done in the dark.”  —Ricardo Cortez Cruz, author of STRAIGHT OUTTA COMPTON

HERE LIES MEMORY will be available September 15th.

Monsieur Godeau, party of one, your table is waiting…

blazac

“It is upon this one comedy that Balzac can lay any claims as a dramatic artist.”
—The New York Times

If you missed the limited edition published in 2013, the wait is over. Mark Axelrod’s translation of this obscure comedy by Balzac is now available worldwide on Amazon in a handsome paperback edition.

Originally presented under the title Mercadet or The Good Businessman, this play in three acts appears to have inspired the creation of the unseen character in Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. Indeed, 102 years before Godot ‘s debut, Mercadet opened at the Theatre du Gymnase-Dramatique in Paris and—curiously enough—featured a character named “Godeau” who never appears on stage.

A comic coincidence? One of life’s little absurdities?

The translator met and corresponded with Beckett, and in WAITING FOR GODEAU we present an unpublished letter from Beckett in which the burning question is answered.

Or is it?

You be the judge.

WAITING FOR GODEAU
by Honore de Balzac
Translated from the French by Mark Axelrod
5.06″ x 7.81″ (12.852 x 19.837 cm)
trade paperback; 154 pages
ISBN-13: 978-0692738108
$12.95

CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON AMAZON