I’m happy to announce that my translation of Alphonse Allais’s My Rent Is Due! is now available from Black Scat Books. This collection, originally published in 1899, includes delightful stories about tapeworms, phantom limbs, floating brothels, and other interesting things. André Breton saluted Allais’s “terrorist activity of the mind”; maybe you will too. (Posted by […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

Let’s Not Hit Each Other is now available from Black Scat Books! This collection by the incomparable Alphonse Allais includes a flying whale, an inflatable colonel, telepathic snails, a summer crime, the insularization of France, missionary parrots, an amphibious herring, twin cousins, and proposals for billboard dogs, deodorized urine, calming the sea with varnish, and crossing […]

[Read more →]

The new expanded edition of Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! I’ve selected, translated, annotated, and introduced scatological songs, stories, poems, and playlets from some of the most inventive and eccentric writers of the golden age of Parisian Bohemia: Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, Charles Cros, J. Eschbach, […]

[Read more →]

My new annotated translation of “Loves, Delights, and Organs,” by Alphonse Allais, is now available from Black Scat Books. Allais was a peerless humorist whose wild imagination, and fascination with technology and language, made him a favorite of Alfred Jarry, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Umberto Eco, and generations of writers. The Pataphysical College named him […]

[Read more →]

July 4th marks the 9th year of Black Scat Books! To celebrate the occasion, they have released a special deluxe hardcover edition of their very first title, Alphonse Allais’s Masks — based on Allais’s story Un drame bien parisien, adapted and illustrated by Norman Conquest, with an introduction and notes by Allaisian scholar Doug Skinner. […]

[Read more →]

2 + 2 = 5 is now available from Black Scat Books! This, if you’re doing the math suggested by the title, is my tenth translation of France’s master humorist, Alphonse Allais. 2 + 2 = 5 (in French, 2 + 2 = 5), was first published in 1895. Allais is in his prime here, […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]