My translation of Charles Cros’s prose works, The Science of Love, is now available from Wakefield Press.

From the publisher:

The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the literary currents of his time, and the other in the field of science. This amalgamation is fully demonstrated in this collection, which includes proto-science-fiction stories; his contributions to what was then the new form of the prose poem; a sober, if fantastical, scientific study on methods of communication with other planets; and the patent application written with his brother for a (never-built) notating keyboard.

The literary imagination he was able to bring into the field of science was matched by the humorous scientific sobriety he introduced into his literature, which he did nowhere so effectively as in the title piece, “The Science of Love”: a depiction of a young scientist’s painstakingly executed seduction of a woman for the sake of scientific analysis, utilizing litmus paper and measuring releases of carbonic acid during maximized passion. Its humor led Joris-Karl Huysmans to include it in the rarefied library of À rebours, where the Collège de ’Pataphysique declared “An Interplanetary Drama” to be a “canonical text.” Also included are stories such as “The Newspaper of the Future” (which presents a nineteenth-century imagining of artificial intelligence) and “The Stone Who Died of Love.”

Charles Cros (1842–1888) was as much Renaissance man as he was poète maudit. A bohemian poet who drank with Verlaine and at one point provided housing to Rimbaud, he also developed the comic monologue as a theatrical genre and invented both the gramophone (which he named the “paléophone”) and color photography (though he failed to patent either before Thomas Edison or Louis Ducos du Hauron), among other such inventions as a non-metallic battery and a musical stenographer. “The freshness of his intelligence was such that no object of desire seemed utopian to him a priori,” André Breton wrote of him, adding: “The pure playfulness of certain wholly whimsical portions of Cros’s work should not obscure the fact that at the center of some of his most beautiful poems a revolver is leveled straight at us.”

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

TYPO #5 is now available to be gawked at and puzzled over! I contributed an essay (“Typoglyphics”), a short story (“The Butler Bulli0n”), a “Bilingual Acrostic Rebus,” and translations of Tabarin and Théophile Gautier.

My distinguished colleagues in this issue are Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Bradley, Anton Chekhov, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, R J Dent, Max Ernst, Eurydice Eve, Luc Fierens, Leonor Fini, Harold Jaffe, Amy Kurman, Lo, Michael Maier, Dmitri Manin, Elena Marini, Lilianne Milgrom, Opal Louis Nations, Marty Newman, Claudio Parentela, Angeleaux Pastormerleaux, Paul Rosheim, Jasia Reichardt, Phil Demise Smith, Lono Taggers, Corinne Taunay, Shyam Thandar, Stefan Themerson, Konstantin Vaginov, and Gregory Wallace.

The whole thing is edited by Norman Conquest, and you can find it at Black Scat Books!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

A Filthy Letter is now available from Black Scat Books!

Théophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a novelist and poet, one of the champions of Romanticism. In 1850, he and his friend Louis de Cormenin visited Italy, so he wrote his friends back home a letter about their adventures. The result was a rollicking “filthy letter,” packed with jokes, slang, obsolete words, literary allusions, puns, alliterations, neologisms, Spoonerisms, verses, outrageous metaphors, and Rabelaisian lists. It was published privately in 1890, and became a clandestine classic.

But you can read it now, translated, introduced, and annotated by Doug Skinner, and available on Amazon!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Rat Wins! is now available from Black Scat Books!

Writer Lucien Descaves and illustrator Lucien Laforge were anarchist activists dismayed by World War I. They cooked up this mordant little satire, pointing out that the real winner of any war is the rat, who feasts on all the corpses–with the suggestion that war profiteers are rats too. It was scheduled for publication in 1917, but banned by the authorities, and didn’t make it to print until 1920.

Written by Lucien Descaves, illustrated by Lucien Laforge, and translated by Doug Skinner. Designed by Derek Pell to resemble the original edition.

And you can find it on Amazon!

We Are Not Sheep is now available from Black Scat Books!

This delightful collection, first published in 1896, shows the peerless French humorist Alphonse Allais in full pursuit of the ridiculous. You’ll find  a painter who trains bats to act as a parasol, the love life of a one-man band, a plan to make sandals from the skin of the poor, the military use of legless soldiers, the man who couldn’t decide where to put his beard when he slept, and much more: 44 stories, plus four extra stories elected for this edition. Translated, annotated, and introduced by Doug Skinner. Designed by Norman Conquest, and with a frontispiece by Corinne Taunay.

And it’s available on Amazon.

Bed Bug: A Magazine of the Arts is now available from Black Scat Books! Here’s the description from its editor, Norman Conquest:

As the world comes to an end, and the bed bug infestation spreads from France throughout Europe, it is time for a journal devoted to infestation, invasion, and chaos.

Featuring works by Alphonse Allais, Tim Anderson, Tom Bradley, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, R J Dent, Larry Fondation, Jesse Glass, Boris Glikman, Rhys Hughes, Harold Jaffe, Amy Kurman, Terri Lloyd, John-Ivan Palmer, Jason E. Rolfe, Paul Rosheim, Thaddeus Rutkowski, Doug Skinner, Yuriy Tarnawsky, Corinne Taunay, Catrin Welz-Stein, Tom Whalen, Carol White. and D. Harlan Wilson.

I contributed a translation of a story by Alphonse Allais (“An Excellent Trick”), a poem (“Lord Bedbug”), and a piano piece (“BEDBAG”). And you can find it on Amazon!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

The Potato Farm is now available! This collection of thirty stories is my first book of short fiction since The Snowman Three Doors Down in 2018.

What happens when constellations socialize, when Faust and the Devil start drinking, when imaginary friends gain imaginary friends, when Sleeping Beauty and Rip van Winkle trade places, when Duncan paints a cockatrice, when a terrifying Werechurch roams the land? And was it really a good idea for August and Collier to start that potato farm, especially given Collier’s troubled past? You’ll find slapstick, vivid characters, fictional physics, and surprising narratives, often filtered through stringent constraints to keep the language lively. If you read only one book this year, read this one over and over again!

It’s designed by Norman Conquest, published by the delightful people at Black Scat Books, and available on Amazon.

Doug Skinner

Typo 3 is now available! For the third issue of this inimitable publication, I contributed a parody of Oscar Wilde (“Bosie’s Translation”), an article on the design of single-serve salt packets, a design for a Hawaiian Ouija board, and a translation of a letter by Aloysius Bertrand, as well as examples from my collection of antique calling cards.

My estimable fellow contributors are Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Barrett, André Breton, Jahan Cader, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, R J Dent, Germaine Dulac, Eckhard Gerdes, Boris Glikman, Vasilisk Gnedov, Amy Kurman, Edward Lee, Emilia Loseva, Gabriel Pomerand, R. Prost, De Villo Sloan, Robert R. Thurman, and Nico Vassilakis.

It’s edited by Norman Conquest, published by Black Scat Books, and available on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

A Concise Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality is now out from Black Scat Books and available on Amazon! I was one of many scholars who contributed to this essential reference work. Here’s Black Scat’s description:

First came the groundbreaking Le Scat Noir Encyclopaedia in 2017. Three years later we launched the pataphysical classic Le Scat Noir Encyclopédie et Dictionnaire de la Pataphysique, des arts et du savoir humain: Volume Deux (in English of course). Today we’re pleased to announce a handy reference destined to become a bestseller among scholars and sex fiends: A Concise Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality — a conveniently sized paperback – perfect for beach orgies or boring church sermons. It’s a volume you’ll want to keep within reach in the bedroom or bath. And it’s guaranteed to answer all your questions. (If not, it’s packed with illustrations to ogle and drool over.)

The Encyclopedia features this distinguished panel of 24 experts of various sexual proclivities: Tim Anderson, Mark Axelrod, Tom Barrett, Cathy Bryant, Lenny Cavallaro, Norman Conquest, Rémy Dambron, R J Dent, Eckhard Gerdes, Jesse Glass, Malcolm Green, Rhys Hughes, Victor Hugo, Amy Kurman, Michael Leigh, David Moscovich, Opal Louis Nations, Peter Payack, Derek Pell, Sourav Roy, Jessica Ross-Dreher, Paul Rosheim, Doug Skinner, and Tom Whalen.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)

That remarkable Welsh writer, Rhys Hughes, edited this delightful anthology, Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: light verse about life and other heavy things. I’m one of 39 contributors, with seven fables in verse. It’s published by Gibbon Moon Books, and can be found on Amazon.

(Posted by Doug Skinner)