Tag: Tom Whalen.

It must be fate, 8 is great…

Reach for quick relief with TYPO #8, a timely remedy for your anxiety and depression. Bring feelings of joy back into your life with its mixture of fictions, poems and artworks from different times and countries. Also it’s a perfect holiday gift for the connoisseurs in your family.

PACKED WITH PROTOMORPHS, DADA, SURREALISM, COLLAGE, FUTURISM, EXPERIMENTAL FICTION, CRIME SCENES, STOLEN LOVE POSITIONS, VISUAL POETRY, BILITERAL ALPHABETS, CONSTRAINED TEXTS, MAD FOLD-INS, FRENCH LITERATURE, ABSURDIST HUMOR, SOUND POEMS, SILENT CINEMA, FIRST ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS, & MORE.

This issue features contributions by Tim Newton Anderson; Tom Barrett; Terry Bradford; Steve Carll; Peter Cherches; Norman Conquest; Lynn Crawford; Jeanne Devlin;  Jean-Christophe Duchon-Doris; Albert Ehrenstein; James Montgomery Flagg; Shawn Garrett; Edward Gauvin; Vasilisk Gnedov; Michael Gould; Allan Randolph Kausch; Amy Kurman; Julia Lillard; Emilia Loseva; George MacLennan; Zach Keali’i Murphy; Opal Louis Nations; Grasset d’Orcet;  Bernard Quiriny; Paul Rosheim; Marcel Schneider;  Doug Skinner; Lono Taggers; Mark Valentine; Renée Vivien; Tom Whalen; Paul Willems; Carla M. Wilson; Danny Winkler; Mark Wyatt.

TYPO #8: The International Journal of Prototypes
155 pp., trade paperback; ISBN: 979-8-9908521-9-8
$20

Our Top Ten Scatsellers

We don’t like to play favorites and with a list of some 200 titles we can’t. But we thought you might like to know which titles have been the most popular. So here is a list of our Top Ten. All are in print, so if you missed one just click on its cover.

10 Oulipo Pornobongo (2016)

9 Le Scat Noir Encyclopedie et Dictionaire (2020)

8 Captain Cap, Alphonse Allais (2013)

7 Le Scat Noir Encyclopedia (2017)

6 Critics & My Talking Dog, Stefan Themerson (2019)

5 The Pope’s Mustard-Maker, Alfred Jarry (2019)

4 The Straw That Broke, Tom Whalen (2014)

3 The Zombie of Great Peru, P-C Blessebois (2015)

2 The Squadron’s Umbrella, Alphonse Allais (2015)

1 Here Lies Memory, Doug Rice (2016)

FICTION ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE

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.

A SPECIAL ISSUE — NOW AVAILABLE!

#20 — THE BLACK HUMOR ISSUE

FEATURING AN INTERNATIONAL CAST OF CHARACTERS:

Alphonse Allais, Mark Axelrod, Jocelyne Geneviève Barque, Tom Barrett, Léon Bloy, Ken Brown, Michael Casey, Wayne Coe, Norman Conquest, Thomas James Cooper, Farewell Debut, S. C. Delaney, Rhys Hughes, Harold Jaffe, David Kuhnlein, Mantis, Marcel Mariën, J. H. Matthews, M. G. Mclaughlin, Jim Meirose, Derek Pell, Agnès Potier, Mark Putzi, Richard Robinson, Marquis de Sade, John Galbraith Simmons, Doug Skinner, Nile Southern, Terry Southern, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Michel Vachey, Tom Whalen, Bill Wolak.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER ON AMAZON

 

June Buffoonery!

Last month we were tickled pink and apple-green to announce
a new collection by THE master of the absurd, Alphonse Allais. For June, we’re JUST PLAIN pickled to unleash THIS anthology of unadulterated nonsense — nonsense in all its merry infestations,  from subtle emanations to cartoon lunacy.

LE SCAT NOIR BEDSIDE NONSENSE is profusely illustrated and packed with AMUSING stories, songs, games, WORDPLAY & poesy by an international roster of inspired misfits.

Featuring: Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, Angie Brenner, Ken Brown, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, Haley Dahl,  Farewell Debut, Paul Forristal, Ryan Forsythe, Penelope Goddard, Jean-Jacques Grandville, Simon Hanes, Rhys Hughes, Alexei Kalinchuk, KKUURRTT, Rick Krieger, David Moscovich, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Bob Rucker, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Doug Skinner, Terry Southern, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Tom Whalen, and Carla M. Wilson.

It’s the perfect antidote  for  summer lockdown  — and  no mask required.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER

back cover

ECSTASY… NOW MORE THAN EVER

Amid the pain of pandemic, we hope this issue of BLACK SCAT REVIEW provides some welcome relief while sheltering in place.

In Plato’s Dialogue Phaedrus, ecstasy is characterized as divine madness or divine possession, and is considered to be a gift to humanity from the gods. However, we may choose to channel our erotic energies into sexual pleasure or the cultivation and worship of erotic beauty. A transcendent state expressed in poetry, a text, or images. This issue is devoted to the fleeting power of ecstasy in its myriad forms, subtle, unequivocal, or unabashedly palpable.

Contributors include: Peter Ruric, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Eurydice, Catherine D’Avis, Galya Kerns, Doug Skinner, Tom Whalen, Bob McNeil, Nicole Scherer, Tom Bussmann, Paul Rosheim, William Minor, Norman Conquest, Adam Matson, Dynamic Wang, Alexandr Ivanov, Jim McMenamin, Rhys Hughes, Amy Kurman, and Emiliano Vittoriosi.

CLICK HERE TO ORDER FROM AMAZON

APRIL FIREBALL

APRIL FIREBALL is HOT—nine early short stories by master fictioneer Tom Whalen. These texts were published between 1972 and 1996, and are previously uncollected. This must-have edition is framed by two stories that reflect the times and wars going on when they were written: “The Ride” (1970, Vietnam); “April Fireball” (1994, the Balkans).

April Fireball marks Whalen’s third title in our Absurdist Texts & Documents series.

Click here to order on Amazon.

Tom Whalen’s books include Elongated Figures, Dolls, Winter Coat, The President in Her Towers, and The Straw That Broke. His translations of short prose by Robert Walser can be found in Selected Stories, Girlfriends, Ghosts, and Other Stories, and the forthcoming Little Snow Landscape and Other Stories.