The 2oth issue of “Black Scat Review” is now available from Black Scat Books! This one is devoted to black humor, 106 pages of it. I contributed a squalid fairy tale, “The Fisherman’s Wish,” a misanthropic song, “We Are Not a Pretty People,” and a translation of Alphonse Allais’s classically tasteless story “The Rajah Is […]

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Bedside Nonsense is now available from Black Scat Books! This anthology, edited by Norman Conquest, offers a dizzying array of approaches to the nonsensical, by a lively group of writers and artists. I contributed “Amerigo and Isabella” (verses about the misadventures of Amerigo Vespucci and Queen Isabella) and “Deucalion’s Ark” (a story about the Greek […]

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Pink and Apple-Green is now available from Black Scat Books! By Alphonse Allais, translated, introduced, and annotated by Doug Skinner! This is the first English translation, and the first annotated edition in any language. It’s 261 pages: 44 stories, plus 5 extra stories. You can get one on Amazon. Alphonse Allais (1854-1905) was France’s greatest […]

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I recently picked up a copy of a book called End Papers, by a certain A. Edward Newton, who apparently accumulated a famous book collection in the ’20s. It’s a selection of literary essays and book reviews, published by Little, Brown, and Co. in 1933. I was surprised to find in it a couple of […]

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Instrumentarium is now available from Black Scat Books! This delightful volume collects the drawings of imaginary musical instruments I contributed monthly to Le Scat Noir, plus many previously unpublished. Among the 180 selected here are such inventions as the Painpipes, the Sprinkler Trombone, the Flugelflute, and the Cavalry Harmonium. As our culture grows ever more […]

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Upside-Down Stories is now available from Black Scat Books! Charles Cros and Émile Goudeau were quintessential Bohemian poets of the 1880s. Cros also experimented with the phonograph and color photography; Goudeau founded the Hydropathes, who met to declaim poetry while not drinking water. Cros and Goudeau’s only collaboration was a series of five exuberant stories […]

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The Best of Le Scat Noiris now available! It collects memorable gems from the online journal edited by the ebullient Norman Conquest, in a large, full-color trade paperback. I have a number of pieces in it, as do many others, to wit: Paulo Brito, Paul Kavanagh, Erik Satie, Samuele Bastianello, Alice Pulaski, Pink Buddha, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Jason […]

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Drawn from Black Scat’s eight editions of the master French absurdist, this compendium is a sublime introduction to the wordplay and black humor that shocked and dazzled Bohemian Paris in the raucous “Banquet Years.” The READER includes the celebrated pataphysical text “A Thoroughly Parisian Drama”–a favorite of both André Breton and the Oulipians–as well as […]

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As a postscript to my book 100 Cartoons from Le Chat Noir, here are some illustrations by Théophile Steinlen, one of the paper’s more prolific artists. That is, by the way, his art on the cover. A brief bio from the book: Steinlen, Théophile Alexandre (1859-1923): Born in Lausanne, Switzerland. Contributed to Le Rire, Gil Blas, Les […]

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101 Cartoons from Le Chat Noir: Early Comics from Bohemian Paris is now available from Black Scat Books! “Le Chat Noir” was one of the liveliest avant-garde papers in 19th century Paris. Published by the legendary cabaret, it delivered a weekly blast of anarchism, pranks, Decadent poetry, and black humor by such luminaries as Alphonse […]

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