Today is Alphonse Allais’s birthday: if he were alive today, he would be 160, which sounds unlikely.  To mark the occasion, here’s a photo of UK poet Edith Doove enjoying the now rare first volume of my translation of Allais’s Captain Cap.  The collected Cap, as well as my recently released translation of Allais’s plays, […]

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The book blog “Wuthering Expectations” has published a nice review of the Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais.  You can read it here. And you can purchase the volume here. Norman Conquest, of Black Scat Books, has also passed along more photos of happy readers. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Look: happy readers!  Won’t you join them?  My translation of Selected Plays of Alphonse Allais is available from Black Scat Books. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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I’ve selected, translated, and annotated a choice selection of plays by Alphonse Allais for this book. First aired in the cabarets and theaters of Paris in the rollicking 1890s, these plays include satire, absurdism, he-she sketches, a burlesque operetta, even a play for dogs.  You’ll find ten monologues, three one-act plays, and twelve shorter skits […]

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The seventh volume of Allais’s posthumous works (499 pp., 1969) contains his weekly columns for Le Sourire, 1901-1904. The cover art is taken from a poster by Jules Chéret for the Palais de Glace (Ice Palace). The eighth and final volume of the posthumous works (641 pp., 1970) collects the following: Allais’s weekly columns for […]

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The fourth volume of Allais’s posthumous works (1968, 484 pp.) collects his column, La Vie Drôle, from Le Journal, 1897 to 1901.  The cover is attributed to Massin. The fifth volume of posthumous Allais (1968, 489 pp.) collects his contributions to Le Journal from 1901 to 1904.  The cover is again attributed to Massin.  The […]

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The rest of François Caradec’s edition of Alphonse Allais’s works is devoted to the “posthumous works.” The term is not quite accurate; almost all of the material was published in Allais’s lifetime. However, it wasn’t included in the collections that Allais himself called his “anthumous works.”  By Caradec’s count, there are 1,887 articles, novels, pamphlets, […]

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Since so little is available in English about Alphonse Allais, and since I’m translating him, I think it would be useful to post a description of his complete works.  The standard edition was edited by François Caradec, and published by La Table Ronde in eleven volumes, from 1964 to  1970.  I’ll summarize it in four […]

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There is a nice of review of my illustrated translation of Captain Cap, by Alphonse Allais, over at Tam Tam Books.  You can purchase a copy from Amazon, you know. I’m happy to report that I’ve been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, for my comic strip “Shorten the Classics: Moby Dick,” in Black Scat Review […]

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Merde à la Belle Époque is now available from Black Scat Books! Doug Skinner has chosen, translated, and annotated a choice selection of scatological texts from Paris’s Bohemian heyday. The texts range from 1883 to 1902, and include poems, stories, a play, a rebus and a letter. You’ll find Alphonse Allais, George Auriol, Georges Courteline, […]

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