The Fortean Society was founded by writer Tiffany Thayer in 1931, to promote the work of Charles Fort. By sheerest coincidence, two of its founding members, Ben Hecht and Alexander Woollcott, contributed to the same anthology, Nonsenseorship, back in 1922. They both wrote essays decrying censorship, and were duly caricatured by Ralph Barton. Here, then, […]

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Horoscrapes is now available!  Here is the publisher’s blurb: Part Oulipian exercise, these meticulous scrapings reveal the future in all its sublime absurdity. The author approached the horoscope in his morning newspaper as if it were a puzzle, like the crossword or sudoku. By scraping out the middle part, and joining the beginning and end, he received a hidden message. Reading outside the lines […]

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For Halloween, an appropriate illustration by Frank C. Papé.  It’s taken from the 1929 edition of Something About Eve, by James Branch Cabell.  Please click on it to savor the details. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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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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One of my insomnia books recently has been The Queer, the Quaint, and the Quizzical: A Cabinet for the Curious, by Frank H. Stauffer.  It’s a compendium of odd facts, superstitions, linguistic curiosities, and folklore, published by David McKay in 1882.  Stauffer, according to what I could find, was a journalist and children’s author; with […]

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Richard Toronto has written the definitive work on the artwork of Richard Shaver, in two volumes, with over 300 illustrations.  I wrote the introduction for the second volume, linking Shaver’s preoccupation with stones and pareidolia to the long tradition of scrying and lithomancy.  You can find it on Amazon.  Here’s Toronto’s description: In 1960, science […]

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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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I’m happy to report that my book The Unknown Adjective and Other Stories has been selected as an editor’s choice in the current issue of The Ironic Fantastic.  Take their suggestion, why don’t you?   (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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