The Zombie is Coming!

ZOMBIE-OF-GREAT-PERU

There is a veritable army of zombie books out there but nothing remotely like this one. This obscure novel—a masterpiece of avant-garde weirdness—was published in France in 1697. It was 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.

The Zombie of Great Peru rises from the grave this April—unleashed worldwide by Black Scat Books in an appropriately fetid trade paperback edition, with cover art & design by Norman Conquest.

Lock your doors and windows.

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Back cover. Bar code not shown for your protection.

 

BLACK SCAT REVIEW 11—Now Available!

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New format, new size, new design PLUS a boatload of great artists and writers: Alphonse Allais, Nika Baum,Sandra Boersma, S. C. Delaney, Tony Duvert, Margie Franzen, William L. Gibson, Kristien Hemmerechts, Andy Koopmans, Richard Kostelanetz, Terri Lloyd, Happy Nightmares, L T O’Rourke, Derek Pell, Bobby Phillips, Agnès Potier, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Nelly Sanchez, Doug Skinner, Mark Stewart, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Carla M. Wilson.  116 pages of sublime art and lit.

BLACK SCAT REVIEW is an international magazine of the arts unlike any other. Issue #11 includes translations of exciting work by Kristien Hemmerechts, Tony Duvert, and Alphonse Allais.

Available now direct from our printer –  CLICK HERE

Or from Amazon worldwide

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BSR #11 is almost here…

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BLACK SCAT REVIEW  has a new look, a new size, and a new format.
Available as a trade paperback in the U.S. and Europe.

FEATURING Alphonse Allais, Sandra Boersma, S. C. Delaney, Tony Duvert, Margie Franzen, William L. Gibson, Kristien Hemmerechts, Andy Koopmans, Richard Kostelanetz, Terri Lloyd, Happy Nightmares, L T O’Rourke, Derek Pell, Bobby Phillips, Agnès Potier, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Nelly Sanchez, Doug Skinner, Mark Stewart, Yuriy Tarnawsky, and Carla M. Wilson.

116 pp.
perfect-bound, illustrated, full color
US Trade Paper edition, 5.06″ x 7.81″
$18.00

 ON SALE NOW

Spring Fever!

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THE NEW URGE READER:
Erotic Fiction by New Women Writers
edited by Norman Conquest

The long-awaited international anthology of erotic fiction by women writers has arrived—just in time!

Got Spring Fever? If not, here’s your ticket to an advanced case—featuring work by Emily June Brink, Suzanne Burns, Catherine D’Avis, Rachel Kendall, Cody Kmoch, Pamela Naruta, L T O’Rourke, Maria Schurr, Star Spider,  and L C Wilkinson. Packed with innovative tales revealing  Eros in a variety of styles – poetic, playful, startling and graphic. Seduction  guaranteed.

Available everywhere on Amazon.

Zombies R Us

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Time to walk (or is it rock?) with the Robot Zombies of Angkor Wat.

Wat’s new? Why, this  new experimental soundtrack mix from Midnight Grindhouse by the one and only DrG Supreme. Man, this audio is cool and ear-ie, so don those headphones, crank up the decibels and trance on over to our Scat Trax page.

Desires that Disappear

And words got souls just as much as we do. Words change when you say them, the way your soul changes when the right woman touches you. Same with photographs. They got souls. You look into a photograph too long, too hard, and you steal the very soul of the photograph…

Doug Rice, from Here Lies Memory

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These remarkable photographic moments – memories – faces from  the street – dig below the surface of flesh and go to the bone where forgotten words are etched. Words like lost souls in joyless eyes.   AN EROTICS OF SEEING goes far beyond today’s omnipotent street images, the snapshots and candid portraits that reveal only surfaces. Doug Rice captures epiphanies in the faces of strangers— finds an “erotic” connection  only a visionary artist can discover. It is not simply a matter of capturing the “decisive moment” — it is the depth his eye perceives —piercing crowded  public spaces and  revealing absences  – ghosts and their memories – the very soul of our transient lives.

AN EROTICS OF SEEING:
The force of photography as philosophy’s broken sentence
Photographs and text by Doug Rice
5.25″ x 8.25″, perfect-bound paper. 64 pp.,
$20  /  Edition limited to 300 copies
ART PHOTOGRAPHY

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

“Doug Rice reveals things about loss, memory, language, invention – things that we didn’t know needed to be said or seen, but learn it in the miraculous accident Rice realizes as writing and photography, and offers it as an inexplicable generosity that resonates with the generosity that Rice intuits in the world he re-inhabits.”
-EARL JACKSON, author of Strategies of Deviance

Alphonse Today! —Hip! Hip! Allais!

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drawing by Doug Skinner

Who was the hippest cat to ever hang his hat at Le Chat Noir in Paris? Alfred Jarry? Erik Satie? Apollinaire? No! Alphonse Allais, of course — the fellow who experimented with holorhymes, invented conceptual art, and created the earliest known example of a silent musical composition: Funeral March for the Obsequies of a Deaf Man (1884). Furthermore, you don’t need a Time Machine to travel back to 1893 to read Allais’s oddly titled collection Le parapluie de l’escouade. In fact — thanks to Doug Skinner’s inspired translation — you don’t even have to read French to enjoy all 39 wickedly funny texts in The Squadron’s Umbrella because Black Scat Books has launched its first publication in English. Yes, it’s another coup for this little house, and a landmark for lovers of French literature and Pataphysical humor.

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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.  The Squadron’s Umbrella collects 39  of Allais’s funniest stories — many originally published in the legendary paper Le Chat Noir, written for the Bohemians of Montmartre. Included are such classic pranks on the reader as “The Templars” (in which the plot becomes secondary to remembering the hero’s name) and “Like the Others” (in which a lover’s attempts to emulate his rivals lead to fatal but inevitable results). These  tales have amused and inspired generations, and now English readers can enjoy the master absurdist at his best. As the author promises, this book contains no umbrella and the subject of squadrons is “not even broached.”

THE SQUADRON’S UMBRELLA
by Alphonse Allais
Translated with an introduction, notes and illustrations by Doug Skinner

6” x 9”, trade paperback. 160 pp., Illustrated.
$12.95  /  ISBN -13  978-0692392126

FICTION / FRENCH LITERATURE / HUMOR

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ALSO AVAILABLE FROM BLACK SCAT BOOKS:

Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks by Alphonse Allais
Translated by Doug Skinner

Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais
Compiled and  translated by  Doug Skinner

Sublime Poetry from Across the Pond

Mince by Edith Doove

Me a seaman’s wife
She the sea, the ocean
Me your land, your solid ground.

Or the other way around – I the sea, the ocean
She your land, your solid ground
She, the seaman’s wife.

Both of us someone’s feast
And you ours…

 

Edith DooveBlack Scat has published only a few books of poetry, so when we do it’s quite an event. This  collection of poems & observations by the gifted young British writer Edith Doove deserves a place on your shelf. Indeed, Ms. Doove has a sharp eye and her words whisper fresh visions.

These works were originally written in Dutch and composed over a ten year period.

We invite you to discover MINCE in this lovely, limited edition  chapbook.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

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*cover photograph by the author

In the wings, some special things (seventh edition)…

 

There is a lot of excitement buzzing around our editorial bunker here in northern California. We are adding quite a few titles to our growing list of sublime art & literature, with books by Alphonse Allais, Alain Arias-Misson, Mark Axelrod, Pierre-Corneille de Blessebois, Farewell Debut, Edith Doove, Eckhard Gerdes, Richard Kostelanetz, Terri Lloyd, Doug Rice, and Carla M. Wilson, among others. As always, expect some surprises, including  (we hope) a book once listed as forthcoming by the great Gaberbocchus Press in London that, alas, never appeared. For now, that’s all we’re at liberty to divulge.

For those who missed out on collecting all 31 titles in the Absurdist Texts & Documents series, we suggest getting in on the ground floor of our New Urge imprint—devoted to contemporary erotic fiction by writers from Europe and North America. The first volume, White Fire & Other Tales by Cody Kmoch has just been released, with four more scheduled to appear in 2015. These sensual trade paper editions are numbered sequentially, handsomely designed, and custom-sized  (5 x 7.7 inches) for your comfort and edification.

We should also mention that our magazine Black Scat Review has been redesigned, and will sport a new look when its eleventh issue appears in the spring.

Here are a few goodies waiting in the wings.

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THE SQUADRON’S UMBRELLA 
by Alphonse Allais
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner
FIRST PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH

A collection of 39 pieces by the great French absurdist. This is quintessential Allais, featuring some of his funniest texts—never before translated.

In regards to the significance of the title, Allais states in his preface the following:

“I have entitled this book The Squadron’s Umbrella for two reasons, which I ask the reader’s indulgence to tick off before him.

  1. There is no mention, in my volume, of umbrellas of any kind.
  2. The vital question of the squadron, considered as a unit of combat, is not even broached.”

That pretty much says it all.

 

 “The Zombie of Great-Peru marks an extremely important literary occasion.” —Apollinaire

Guillaume Apollinaire

THE ZOMBIE OF GREAT-PERU
by Pierre-Corneille de Blessebois
Preface by Guillaume Apollinaire
Translated from the French by Doug Skinner
FIRST PUBLICATION IN ENGLISH

Black Scat Books will proudly resurrect this rollicking novel featuring the first mention of zombies in world literature! Originally published in 1697, it offers “a biting satire of colonial society as licentious, credulous, and possessed by its own belief in zombis.”*

In the words of translator Doug Skinner, this libertine tale is “Great fun. Filled with sex, slapstick, deceit, and fake zombies.”

Who could ask for anything more?

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*Doris Garraway, The Libertine Colony

mince-ed

MINCE
by Edith Doove

A collection of poems & observations by a gifted young British writer. These works were originally written in Dutch and composed over a ten year period.

Ms. Doove has a sharp eye and her words whisper fresh visions.

PUBLICATION; January 31, 2015