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 […]
Entries Tagged as 'Books'
The Science of Love
April 1st, 2024 · No Comments
Tags: Books
A Filthy Letter
March 4th, 2024 · No Comments
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 […]
Tags: Books · Literature
The Rat Wins!
January 16th, 2024 · No Comments
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 […]
We Are Not Sheep
December 4th, 2023 · No Comments
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 […]
Tags: Alphonse Allais · Books
The Potato Farm
October 25th, 2023 · No Comments
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 […]
Tags: Books
A Concise Encyclopedia of Human Sexuality
July 13th, 2023 · No Comments
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 […]
Tags: Books
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral
June 21st, 2023 · No Comments
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)
Tags: Books
The Man Who Ate His House
June 5th, 2023 · No Comments
The Man Who Ate His House is now available from Black Scat Books and available on Amazon! For this curious little volume, Derek Pell and I selected plots from the cautionary writer’s manual 101 Plots Used and Abused (James N. Young, 1945), modified and combined them in various ways, and fed them to ChatGPT. The […]
Tags: Books
Let’s Not Hit Each Other
March 15th, 2023 · Comments Off on Let’s Not Hit Each Other
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 […]
Tags: Alphonse Allais · Ancient History · Books
Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York
October 17th, 2022 · Comments Off on Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York
I had the honor of translating Corinne Taunay’s booklet Marcel Duchamp: Paris Air in New York, now available from Black Scat Books on Amazon. Marcel Duchamp‘s exile in New York, in 1915-1917, brought him sudden fame and changed the course of his career. Corinne Taunay’s lively and witty study describes the scandals of Nude Descending […]
Tags: Books · Literature