JULY 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 series 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.

Later 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.

The 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 LIES 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.