The long-awaited “errata” issue is now available.
FEATURING WORKS BY: Terri Carrion, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, Farewell Debut, S. C. Delaney, Jean-Pierre Duffour, Errorbiblioteca, Paul Forristal, Ryan Forsythe, Eckhard Gerdes, Rhys Hughes, Amy Kurman, Alex McKeown, Claudio Parentela, Angelo Pastormerlo, Agnès Potier, Collin J. Rae, C. R. Resetarits, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Doug Skinner, Kristine Snodgrass, Linda Klieger Stillman, Corinne Taunay, Michel Vachey, Carla M. Wilson.
Jason E. Rolfe‘s mesmerizing new chapbook, THE PUPPET-PLAY OF DOCTOR GALL, is a shadowy existential drama — an absurdist murder-mystery set in Vienna in 1820, with a cast of curious characters: Franz Joseph Gall, The Stranger, Ernst Sieber, Tomas Hocheder, Madam Denebecq, and Count Sedlnitzky.
Are they mere puppets whose every move is directed from above by Madam Denebecq, a self-titled mechanikus? Or are they all too human, performing their lives before our very eyes? And who, in the name of heaven, has stolen the head of Franz Joseph Haydn?
We had intended to reveal the answers to these questions but, alas, it’s too late. The lights have dimmed and the audience is holding its collective breath (if breathe they do).
Order your copy before the curtain rises.
No strings attached.
Choice selections from the international monthly journal LE SCAT NOIR, where art & literature hit the fan. Good shit guaranteed!
Featuring:
Paulo Brito, Paul Kavanagh, Erik Satie, Samuele Bastianello, Alice Pulaski, Pink Buddha, Doug Skinner, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Jason E. Rolfe, Eckhard Gerdes, Harold Jaffe, Tom Whalen, Darlene Altschul, Madalina Tantareanu, Sheila Pell, Samantha Memi, Opal Louis Nations, Alphonse Allais, Francisque Sarcey, Carla M. Wilson, Terri Lloyd, Mercie Pedro e Silva, Georges Hugnet, Norman Conquest, Paul Rosheim, Carol White, Michael Leigh, Nile Southern, Mantis Man, Tom Bussmann, Edward Lear, Mark Axelrod, Adao Iturrusgaral, Jim Johnson, Rick Krieger, Pippa Anais Gaubert, Rebecka Skog, Frank Pulaski, Jim McMenamin, Gail Schneider, Franciszka Themerson, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Tom La Farge, Theodore Carter, Nick Frost, Farewell Debut, Quixote, Robin Wyatt Dunn, Allan Bealy, Angela Pankosky, Brett Stout, Uwe Taubert, Iacyr Anderson Freitas, Desiree Jung, Andy Koopmans, Jim Meirose, Russell Helms, Peter Payack, Adrienne Auvray, Gelett Burgess, and Eugene Ivanov.
This special edition is available direct from the printer. CLICK HERE to order this lavish collector’s edition.
Charles Holdefer‘s perceptive review of Debra Di Blasi‘s collection TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER appears in The Collagist.
To order a copy of the book CLICK HERE.
Today is the day Debra Di Blasi‘s cutting-edge alternative fictions flash before our eyes. This provocative new collection reveals our secret lives on social media — exposes the code behind our narcissistic sexting & selfies with feral wit. Indeed, this book is a savage bible defining our digital existence, here & now. Today.
TODAY is the day of resurrection and death in the NEW AMERICA. TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER.
Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER is a fierce and real-time live-stream pastiche that inhabits voices and points-of-view of our new “American” multitude. Terrifyingly sincere and aching with loss one moment, angry, cruel, even bigoted the next, Di Blasi’s anti-Whitmanian universe expands and collapses into every imaginable corner of what our world has become, to salvage true moments out of this white noise at the penetralia of our virtual hornet’s nest, in which bodies have somehow come alive, “crawled right out of the trashbin of history into the light of public office.” How it smokes and hums with danger! Readers beware: This hilarious and moving book is not a safe space.—Sam Witt, author of Little Domesday Clock
No one else writes about the current social climate with the badass gusto of Debra Di Blasi. No one! Politically incorrect, seriously playful, often shocking, incorrigible in all the right ways, self-indicting, yet devastatingly human, Di Blasi’s prose grabs contemporary culture by the throat and holds on in a dazzling stranglehold where the “I” of the shitstorm is “you.” -Aimee Parkison, author of Refrigerated Music far a Gleaming Woman
Will the world end with a whimper or a bang? Debra Di Blasi’s TODAY IS THE DAY THAT WILL MATTER gives us a compelling third option: It will end in a whir of pronouncements, gossip, apologies, braggadocio, and the rest of the nonstop human noise we call culture. In 138 very short fictions ranging from the TV show “Chopped” to a pig farm, a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room and the fantasies of a college professor, Di Blasi’s compressed prose and linguistic play result in a jack-in-the-box kind of release found in good poetry. This is a writer in full control of language, from regional idiom to scientific jargon. “I wish to speak of things that are not I” says a character in one story, even as the character in another acts out the wish for permeability “I stuck my finger inside. Something bled. I’m sure it was you.” Despite our desire to escape the metaphysical and environmental catastrophes we’ve long wrought by now flirting with the concept of a human-robot future, Di Blasi reminds us elegantly and ferociously exactly where our human actions have placed us. -Leslie McGrath, author of Feminists Are Passing from Our Lives
Today Is the Day That Will Matter: An Oral History of the New America: #AlternativeFictions
by Debra Di Blasi
Trade paperback, 150 pages, $12.95
NOW AVAILABLE WORLDWIDE ON AMAZON — CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON AMAZON BEFORE IT’S CENSORED.
If Black Scat opened a cinema in San Francisco, we’d be screening Temenuga Trifonova‘s TOURIST—the award-winning film based on her innovative novel.
Instead, we’ve done the next best thing: published TOURIST in a Black Scat Paperback Original edition.
Meet Jack Sturrett, a book reviewer for a London literary magazine. Dissatisfied with his job, he makes an impulsive decision to leave the city without informing anyone of his departure. He boards a bus which takes him to a small town up north where he gets a job as a tourist guide after becoming so widely read in the town”s history that he passes for a local. Outside work he maintains the identity of a tourist, living in hotels and constantly reinventing his back-story. As his fake local persona becomes threateningly real, he finds himself a suspect in a murder investigation.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Temenuga Trifonova is Associate Professor of Cinema and Media Studies at York University in Toronto. Her first novel, Rewrite, was published by NON Publishing (Vancouver) in 2014. A film adaptation of Tourist (2017, 100 min), which she wrote and directed herself, won “Best Feature” at Mostra del Cinema di Taranto, Italy (2018). The film has also been screened at the Philosophical Film Festival (Skopje, 2018), and the Blow-Up International Art House Film Festival (Chicago, 2017). Trifonova is the author of the scholarly monographs Warped Minds: Cinema and Psychopathology (2014) and The Image in French Philosophy (2007), and the edited volumes Contemporary Visual Culture and the Sublime (2017) and European Film Theory (2008). She has been a visiting scholar and/or artist at the American Academy in Rome, the Brown Foundation at the Dora Maar House (France), The Fondation des Treilles (France), the New York University Center for European and Mediterranean Studies, and the Pushkinskaya Art Centre in St. Petersburg. She is currently a Marie Curie Fellow at Le Studium Centre for Advanced Studies in Tours, France.
Trifonova’s vision in her own words: “My work explores questions of identity: How do we know who we are? What are the limits of one’s identity? What are the limits of a delusion? Is it possible to escape from oneself? Is it possible to fail at being oneself? My characters often feel they are in control of their lives only to find out that they might not be who they thought they were, or that the world might not conform to their beliefs and expectations.”
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
Originally published by Black Scat on January 16, 2013, this innovative collection of short stories by Alain Arias-Misson remains a popular title on our backlist. We’ve given the book a fresh cover design by Norman Conquest.and trust it will attract new readers in search of sublime literature. Copies are available at a discount on Amazon and you can order it here.
Guaranteed to put a spring in your step!
Featuring …
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Happy New Year!
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