The only encyclopedias you’ll ever need—the Triad of Truth & Human Knowledge—only from Black Scat Books. Why spend hundreds of dollars and fill your library shelves when three inexpensive, illustrated paperbacks are all you need. No fuss, no mess. Get smart and you can know it all for less than a tank of gas.
Click on the titles below and order today before the world burns to a crisp.
Le Scat Noir Encyclopédie et Dictionnaire de la Pataphysique
Those familiar with Tom Whalen’s writing will have already skipped this sentence and jumped to the “buy now” button below. For those who have yet to experience his short fictions, you’re in for a treat.
In Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation ants make their way to the edge of the universe, an old doll rocks her nights away in the attic of an abandoned theater shop, “delivery trucks rumble up from the earth,” flies “feast off the flytrap of the sky,” a room falls in love with its inhabitant, and a man gives birth to a puppet. Populating the whole are troubled old men, grandmothers, a green man and priests, as well as dolls, mice, prose poets, and other fabular fauna. Drawn from Whalen’s work in the field over the past five decades, the sixty-seven prose poems and micro-fictions of The Grand Equation are comic, surreal, philosophical, disquieting and, as John Taylor commented in Michigan Quarterly Review on Whalen’s “Why I Hate the Prose Poem,” “particularly subtle.”
Reading Tom Whalen’s Grand Equation, I am reminded of my early years of writing prose poetry and reading the great masters of the form including Baudelaire, Jacob, Edson, Tate, and Simic. Like the great prose poets before him, Whalen’s work is startling, witty, surreal, and metaphysical. He uses the form to enchant and to entertain, to describe other worlds and offer new windows onto this one. His images, parables, and insights make the absurd seem ordinary and vice versa. And remind me that the world is not as I imagine it to be, and neither am I. This is a collection to ponder, savor and return to.
—NIN ANDREWS, author of The Last Orgasm
THE GRAND EQUATION
Prose Poems and Micro-Fictions
Tom Whalen
$14.95 paperback
ISBN 979-8-9859996-8-6
Tom Whalen’s short prose has appeared in Great American Prose Poems, Sudden Fiction, An Introduction to the Prose Poem, The Best of the Prose Poem, A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly, Unscheduled Departures, The Party Train and other anthologies. His two selections and translations of short prose by Robert Walser — Girfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories and Little Snow Landscape — are published with NYRB Classics. His novel The Straw That Broke and collection April Fireball: Early Stories are both available from Black Scat.
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THIS POST WAS UPDATED 4.30.22
Black Scat author Caroline Crépiat poses with her edition of LE CHAT NOIR EXPOSED at the recent exposition of Incohérents art at the l’Olympia in Paris. A true funhouse of exhibits and quite a scandal still, just as the early exposition in 1893 shocked the city. The Incoherents were irrational, satirical, iconoclastic and absurdist, but were they artists asked the public? “Mais oui,” exclaimed Jules Lévy, the founder of the Incoherent Art movement, “but these artists don’t know how to draw.” (haha)
Imagine the gasps of attendees when they spied Alphonse Allais‘s green cab curtain, titled Des souteneurs, encore dans la force de l’âge et le ventre dans l’herbe, boivent de l’absinthe (Pimps still in the prime of life and lying face down in the grass drink absinthe)—one of the earliest monochromes in the history of art!—shocking indeed.
Most of the original Incoherent’s artworks & ephemera did not survive, and could only be seen in 19th century illustrations. But then, in 2021, came a remarkable discovery in France — a large trunk with 17 examples of art by Incoherents, including Allais’s monochrome.
But wait…were these artworks real, or fakes and forgeries? And why was the show limited to only 4 hours of viewing?? (What next? A drive-thru exhibition?)
Experts, such as our friend, artist and critic, Corinne Taunay, have been investigating and discovered that several items (including Allais’s curtain!) aren’t authentic. Mon dieu! — another scandal rocks the Parisienne artworld! This brazen scam appears designed to reap enormous profit (10 million euros, anyone?) off the memory of dead avant-garde rebels.
Meanwhile, here in America where everything is branded “fake” today, we remain respectfully silent on the controversy. However, what we can guarantee is the authenticity of Ms. Crépiat’s LE CHAT NOIR EXPOSED. Indeed, her book is the real deal — translated from the French by the great Doug Skinner — an extraordinary work of scholarship that ‘exposes’ the liveliest fin-de-siècle bohemian cabaret and journal in Paris.
CLICK HERE and see for yourself.
“A harsh, hilarious, scurrilous, and scatological satire.”
—Ed Simon, JSTOR Daily
Poet John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester, was considered one of the greatest English satirists — a nimble wit and scribbler of sublime wordplay, parodies & pornographic puns.
Hailed by Graham Greene and Ezra Pound, Wilmot is perhaps best known for his outrageous libertine satires, including this wickedly funny Restoration drama.
Originally titled The Farce of Sodom, or the Quintessence of Debauchery, DEBAUCH-O-RAMA is an absurdist “closet drama” – written to be read aloud and not performed. It consists of five acts in raunchy rhyming couplets and a madcap cast of characters:
CAST
Let the curtain rise and the laughter begin!
DEBAUCH-O-RAMA
A Restoration Closet Drama
by John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester
Pocket Erotica [№ 11 ]
65 pp.; paper, perfect bound; 4 x 6 inches; $10
ISBN 978-1-7357646-2-7
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
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
Black humor hits a high note in this grand collection of music & lyrics. “Buenas Noches, Little Roaches,” “Breeders Can’t Be Choosers,” “My Pal Satan,” and many more of Skinner’s greatest hits in one snazzY large format paperback EDITION. This compilation of hand-crafted sheet music makes the perfect accompaniment to every nuclear family gathering. SO huddle round the piano and rev up those vocal cords!AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE ON AMAZON — CLICK HERE TO ORDER
About Doug Sinner
Doug Skinner has contributed articles and cartoons to Black Scat Review, Oulipo Pornobongo, The Fortean Times, Strange Attractor Journal, Fate, Weirdo, The Anomalist, Nickelodeon, Cabinet, and other fine publications. Black Scat has published several books of his stories and cartoons, as well as his translations of the French humorist Alphonse Allais.
He has written music for several dance companies, including ODC-San Francisco and Margaret Jenkins; his scores for actor/clown Bill Irwin include The Regard of Flight, The Courtroom, The Regard Evening, and The Harlequin Studies. He has performed his songs (the ones inside this book) in many theaters, clubs, and cabarets. His puppet shows with Michael Smith have been seen everywhere from Caroline’s Comedy Club in Manhattan to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
TV and movie appearances include Great Performances, The ‘90s, Martin Mull’s Talent Takes a Holiday, Ed, Crocodile Dundee II, and a smattering of commercials.
He lived for decades in Manhattan, but has moved to New Paltz, a few miles to the north.
Click here for a Free sample.
excerpt
Amid the intensity of our ongoing fundraising drive, it’s always nice to be able to offer our readers something free, such as the current issue of Le Scat Noir. Number 215 features works by Paulo Brito, Norman Conquest, Paul Kavanagh, Jason E. Rolfe , and Doug Skinner.
CLICK HERE to download the PDF.
HAPPY MAY DAY!
Black Scat Books is flushed with pride to announce the launch of PISSOIRS, BIDETS, CRAPPERS & THRONES by Adrienne Auvray. This coffee table chapbook for the john features sublime, full color photographs taken by Ms. Auvray on her travels around the globe.
FEATURING SUMPTUOUS SPREADS FROM THE WORLD’S GREATEST HEADS
The author has devoted her professional career to the documentation and philosophical interpretation of toilets. A student of photographer Thomas P. Ünterbottem, she completed her dissertation at the esteemed Ünterbottem Academy in Stuttgart, Germany, in 1992. Her work has appeared in field journals such as The Lounge, WC-Time, and Heads-Up, and she has served as the Chair of the International Society of Toilets for the last five years.
This collection of provocative photographs is not merely a visual divertissement, but provides a visionary subtext and philosophical approach to life itself. Indeed, this pictorial exploration and explication d’image reveals our common humanity at its most fundamental.
After all, life is just a bowl.
Now available in both print and digital editions for collectors, connoisseurs, and the scatologically curious.
PISSOIRS, BIDETS, CRAPPERS & THRONES
by Adrienne Auvray
with an introduction by Thomas P. Ünterbottem
5.25″ x 8.25″ – perfect-bound paper, 64 pp., illustrated
with full color photographs
Price: $15 / Digital edition for people on the go: $6
In 2009, artist Terri Lloyd’s iconic Pink Buddha landed at Ground Zero, i.e., the L.A. art scene, and has been making absurdist mischief ever since. One never knows in what form the imperturbable PB will materialize. It has been sighted in guerrilla theater performances, on YouTube, Facebook, in small press art-lit mags, in commie porn chapbooks, posters, paintings, and other subterranean venues. Now, finally, Black Scat Books proudly presents a deluxe collection – a full color trade paperback edition – devoted to Pink Buddha’s inspirational (and educational!) mantras.
WHEN I GROW UP is destined to win the hearts and minds of art connoisseurs and rabid consumers the world over.
WHEN I GROW UP AND OTHER MANTRAS
by Terri Lloyd
74 pages; full color, large format (8.5 x 11 inches) collector’s edition. $24.95
ISBN: 978-0692633915
This title is out of print.
blackscatbooks.com 