Feeding Time is now available from Black Scat Books!

This collection of Alphonse Allais’s short pieces, originally published in 1897, shows the great French humorist at his best, spinning out stories, fables, dialogues, and articles with elegance and imagination. You’ll find clandestine train stations and incandescent leeks, the rules for attending funerals with a bicycle, proposals for celluloid money and explosive confetti, the diplomatic problems of flatulence, and a gallery of swindlers, lovers, and adulterers. Allais’s most popular character, Captain Cap, appears to describe cannon billiards and to suggest replacing carrier pigeons with fish. Translated, annotated, and introduced by Doug Skinner, who also drew the frontispiece.

With this book, Black Scat Books’ editor Norman Conquest and I complete our Alphonse Allais library. It includes all eleven of the collections Allais called his “Anthumous Works,” plus six additional volumes: Captain Cap: His Adventures, His Ideas, His Drinks; The Blaireau Affair (Allais’s only novel); Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais; I Am Sarcey (his stories featuring Francisque Sarcey); Alphonse Allais’s Masks: Deluxe Special Edition (an illustrated version of one of his stories); and a sampler, The Alphonse Allais Reader.

Allais’s work was praised by, among others, André Breton, René Magritte, Umberto Eco, Rachilde, Marcel Duchamp. Harry Mathews, and the Collège de ‘Pataphysique. And here it is for English readers!

(Posted by Doug Skinner)