Good Humour

good_humour
If you’ve missed any of these, now’s the time to stock up. Remember, good humour is hard to find.

Click to order HOT HEART OF BOAR & OTHER TASTES
Click to order CAPTAIN CAP – VOL. II
Click to order THE NEGLECTED WORKS OF NORMAN CONQUEST
Click to order COLD IN THE BRAIN
Click to order THE COMPLETE UNABRIDGED LEXICON
Click to order IT’S FUN TO BE RICH IN AMERICA
Click to order A CAMI SAMPLER
Click to order CAPTAIN CAP – VOL. I
Click to order A BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO ART DECONSTRUCTION

Captain Cap Sails Again!

Captain Cap (Vol. II)

Climb aboard and pop your corks, Captain Cap (Vol II) sets sail today!

We recognize the inherent risks of launching a book on the first day of April, yet we’ve decided to push ahead—(or should we say shove off?)—since it’s entirely appropriate when the author is Alphonse Allais, the great French innovative humorist. Moreover, on this very day in 1897, Paul Ollendorff christened Allais’s Album primo-avrilesque (April Foolish Album)—a portfolio featuring seven monochromatic paintings which anticipated abstract art. Sadly, the album has gone unnoticed by so-called “art historians,” but we’ll leave that fight for another day.

Presently, this second volume—(two more to follow!)—gets down to the nitty-gritty, i.e., Allais’s legendary stories peppered with bizarre inventions, tall tales, philandering, and—oh yes—frequent liquid refreshments. Come to think of it, the phrase “traveling the high seas” may well have been coined in honor of the good captain’s bar-hopping.

Now’s your chance to discover a whole world of exotic trivia, such as…

  • THE SECRET BEHIND MEAT-LAND
  • UNKNOWN FACTS ABOUT GIRAFFES
  • HOW TO PAY ONE’S AMOROUS DEBTS
  • EXPERIMENTS IN HYPNOTISM
  • NAME THAT ORANGUTAN
  • INTERSTELLAR COMMUNICATIONS
  • HOW TO RECYCLE CONFETTI

And much, much more.

The Apparent Symbiosis Between the Boa and Giraffe has been painstakingly translated  by the versatile Doug Skinner. who has illustrated the book with 17 original drawings done in true Allaisian spirit. He also provides an enlightening introduction and extensive notes containing historical tidbits that bring La Belle Époque alive.

At over 100 pages, this collectible edition marks a watershed moment for the Absurdist Texts & Documents series, and is one of several reasons why the word “chapbook”  should be thrown overboard.

So don’t miss out on this gala voyage. Click here and order a copy.

We wish you all a happy April Fool’s! (And that’s no joke.)

Dinner is served!

boar-relase

Fresh from the oven comes HOT HEART OF BOAR—piping hot and throbbing—in a limited edition of 125 copies. The collection features rare, unpublished texts, including an excerpt from The Hunters of Karinhalla bloody brilliant uproduced screenplay (emphasis on “bloody”). There’s also a private letter to William Burroughs; a vomiting priest; “K.Y. Madness,” and more. In addition to the author’s culinary delights, you’ll find illuminating introductory notes by Nile Southern, as well as tastefully explicit illustrations by Norman Conquest.

In short, it’s is a full-boar feast for famished fans of black humor.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

Book Worship

rkOn Monday 25 March, 7 pm. at McNally-Jackson, 52 Prince Street, between Lafayette and Mulberry Streets, Richard Kostelanetz will present over one dozen recent books rarely, if ever, seen before, most of them extending his earlier achievements at the intersection of literature and book-art, many of them produced with the seductive new technology of “on-demand printing” and thus reasonably priced, at least for now.

Among them are Epiphanies, two vols., 1000 pages, one story to a book page, culminating thirty years of work with resonant single-sentence climax moments in otherwise nonexistent fictions, a typographical feast for a monumental project, 8½” x 11”.

Conceptual Fictions, an extended essay with examples about the framing of implicit narratives.

Visual Fictions, collecting pages designed more than a decade ago for hisOpenings and Complete Stories, along with his Leonardo and Me.

Verbal Fictions, various formally alternative narratives that are not visually enhanced.

Vocal Shorts, an expanded edition of his texts designed for live performance for various numbers of players.

Openings Short Fictions, in the tradition of Epiphaniesthe initial sentences of otherwise nonexistent stories.

Reflections on Loving and Relationships, his aphorisms continuously on right-hand pages against drawings of men and women made by the prominent choreographer Frances Alenikoff.

Furtherest Fictions, which reprints, revised, an earlier collection of his exploration of radically alternative narrative well beyond what every other fictioner is doing.

A Universe of Sentences, a continuous selection of lines by others worth remembering, the whole representing a universe of experience.

1001 Stories Enumerated, single-sentence fictions that, unlike Openings andEpiphanies, are meant to be complete in themselves.

Erotic Minimal Fictions, a variety of prose alternatives constituting the apex of avant-garde erotica.

Fields/Arenas/Pitches/Turfs, which completes the publication of geometric poems—with four, eight, and sixteen words to a large book page–begun thirty years ago.

1-99: A Book, another Kostelanetz narrative, in the tradition of Exhaustive Parallel Intervals (1979), composed only of numerals.

Ghostories, which are fictions created by boldfacing certain letters within a single word (e.g., address).

Homophones: Stories, where narratives are composed from two or sometimes more words that sound alike if spelled differently.

To & Fro &, where the reader’s discovery of narratives depend upon turning the book’s pages.

Ops & Clos, where opening and closings words, each pair with its own typography, are interspersed amidst each other.

English, Really English, in which he collects English words that seem incredible—over five thousand of them alphabetically in several perfectbound volumes.

What I Didn’t Do, which epitomizes intellectual nonhistory as Kostelanetz’s record of proposals that were never supported.

A Book of Eyes, photocopied and velobound, which explores the richly various ways that the single letter between H and J appears in contemporary typography

His presentation may also include such slightly older books as Skeptical Essays (Autonomedia), his latest collection of mostly severe criticism; Three Poems (NY Quarterly), where his experiments with three strains of one-word poetry appear interspersed; Micro Fictions (Archae), a limited-edition hardback with 900 pages of Louis Bury’s imaginatively designed narratives all three words and less; the reprint of his classic anthology of alternative expositions, Essaying Essays (AC Books); and maybe some others.

In May, Black Scat will publish Richard’s new book The Works & Life of Kosty Richards: An American Career in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series (#15)—thus adding to this vast library of experimental fiction.

Look it up!

lexicon-cover

Masonic
Sound or sounds which pass rapidly through brick and stone walls

Matinee
A church service of morning prayer followed by a Biblical movie

Mausoleum
Hard floor-covering made of ground cork and linseed oil on a canvas backing, found in many large, imposing tombs throughout Asia Minor

Maximum
A full-time working mother with a large family

Mayonnaise
The sophisticated dance routine of a Central American Indian tribe who had formulated a highly developed civilization

Mazurka
A lively dance through a confusing, intricate network of pathways bordered with neatly kept topiary

Mediocre
The 15th Century sport of pissing in another’s glass of mead

Megger
A female mugger

Melancholia
A tonic made from cantaloupes prescribed to relieve extreme depression

Membranophone
A telephonic apparatus for transmission of sound or speech to a distant point through a pliable series of layers composed of animal or vegetable tissue (a soft house-phone)

Mercantile
A lizard-like reptilian found in many polluted waters

Mermaid’s purse
(Slang) A rather wet, slobbery kiss

Mesopause
The split floor area of a low story between two other stories of greater height in a building

Mesopeak
A mountain summit of lesser altitude than those which overshadow it on one or more sides

Metallurgy
A hypersensitivity to specific alloys such as brass or bronze

Metaphor
An imaginary apparatus for conveying objects and concepts which do not literally denote, in order to suggest comparison with another object or concept by means of mental signals, as a bright idea, the radiance of which may be changed

Methanation
An aggregation of Methodist persons of the same ethnic family, often speaking the same language or cognate languages

___
from The Complete Unabridged Lexicon by Opal Louis Nations

The Brighton Daily Herald says “Nations gives new meaning to the word definition.”

OUT OF PRINT

Live from New York…

scataround

nyc1

Literary legends Yuriy Tarnawsky (left) and Alain Arias-Misson at the Emily Harris Gallery reception last night. It was a glittering & festive evening marking Alain’s return visit to the Big Apple for a series of readings & performances (see previous post here). He holds in his hand a spanking new copy of his fiction collection, THE MAN WHO WALKED ON AIR & OTHER TALES OF INNOCENCE, published by Black Scat Books.

<<UPDATE—MARCH 16>>

uk-reading

Alain Arias-Misson reading from his new collection of erotic “tales of innocence” to a packed crowd at the Ukrainian Institute of America. Everyone’s talking about The Man Who Walked On Air.  You can catch Alain tonight at the White Box for an “Avant-Garde Variety Show”‏—don’t miss It.   329 Broome Street, New York, NY 10002 | Tel: 212-714-2347.

Southern Discomfort…

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A yummy treat (for those with strong stomachs) is coming soon in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series…a new collection of strange  “tastes” from the late master chef Terry Southern:

HOT HEART OF BOAR & Other Tastes

We’ll be serving it fresh—piping hot and throbbing—in a limited edition of only 125 copies. First come, first served.

The book features rare unpublished texts, including an excerpt from The Hunters of Karinhalla screenplay that, sadly, was never filmed. It’s a bloody masterpiece, and we do mean bloody. There’s also a private letter to William Burroughs; a vomiting priest; “K.Y. Madness,” and more.

In addition to the author’s culinary delights, you’ll find illuminating introductory notes by Nile Southern, as well as tastefully explicit illustrations by Norman Conquest.

In short, it’s a full-boar feast for famished fans of black humor.

Prepare to dig in.