Author Amy Kurman gets her first peek at her new fiction collection.
You too can share in Amy’s delight by ordering your very own copy.


It’s an exciting time at Black Scat when we get the chance to publish a talented writer’s first book. So we’re ecstatic to announce the launch of Amy Kurman‘s collection of fiction — SHORTS.
Featuring edgy, witty, strange, & sexy short stories by a powerful new voice
This is now a BLACK SCAT BOOKS BESTSELLER!

“Those of you who have not yet met the work of Amy Kurman are in for a treat. Her debut collection is compelling, quirky, and crafted with effective attention to detail. Some passages could easily be sung for how mellifluous they are. Shorts is a compendium of compelling juxtapositions, a contrapuntal delight, but, most of all, it is the type of work that resonates in the mind long after the actual reading has ended. Kurman has the rare ability to write prose in feminine and masculine voices. Her sardonic story, ‘A Night at the Zoo,’ reads like an old black-and-white film, like something Alec Guinness or Charlie Chaplin might have done. Excellent!” —Eckhard Gerdes, author of The Pissers’ Theatre
“Don’t be fooled by the length of the affectionately bizarre stories in Shorts. A colony of dryads, a sentient Kit-Kat clock called by its wrong name, two moles in an existential marital crisis, these tropes of strangeness belie an underbelly of social commentary about the human condition that I couldn’t stop reading.
A new satirist is in our midst.”
—Suzanne Burns, author of The Veneration of Monsters

The. author at Powell’s Bookstore in Portland.
Next month, Black Scat will publish Doug Skinner‘s much anticipated collection of short stories, SLEEPYTIME CEMETERY. This event will certainly have Skinner’s growing cult following dancing on the grave of 21st century Literature. So, too, should fans of absurdist fiction and dark humor prepare to rejoice.
For those who have yet to encounter Mr. Skinner’s peculiar creations, we offer here a FREE story from the book.