I wrote the introduction for Amanda DeMarco’s sparkling translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, by Gaston de Pawlowski, now available from Wakefield Press. Here’s what Wakefield has to say: Originally published in book form in 1916, Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations collects the humorist’s numerous columns mocking and deflating […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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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)

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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 […]

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