Gelett Burgess’s story “The Man Who Lived Backward” (Blue Book Magazine, January 1946) uses anagrams in a way I haven’t seen before. The story is, as the title warns us, about a man who lived backward, aging into an infant. The man is named Levi Wicet, and we are informed that the men in the […]

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I’m now translating the comic monologues of Charles Cros (1842-1888), and am consequently unraveling the various versions of his first one, Le hareng saur. It’s not only one of Cros’s most popular poems, still dutifully recited by French schoolchildren, but one of the few translated into English. Most English readers, if they know Cros at […]

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No Bile! is now available from Black Scat Books! This is my 8th translation of the peerless French proto-dadaist Alphonse Allais (1854-1905). This collection of what he called his “anthumous works” includes love stories, revenge stories, short-shorts, and unclassifiable prose, all affronting the reader with startlingly modern black humor, imagination, and wordplay. Among the highlights […]

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Another new verse form: the equiliteral tercet. Like its geometrical model, the equilateral triangle, it’s composed of three equal parts: three lines of three words, each with three letters. It need not rhyme, but these three examples do: Old men say Now it’s day Cut the hay Sty for pig Fly for fig Tie for […]

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The Snowman Three Doors Down is now available from Black Scat Books! It has 24 stories! It’s 246 pages! Hapless characters slog through tangled plots and formal constraints in this bracing collection. Will the Chromatologist find the shade of green that identifies the adulterous cosplayer? Will a group of tipsy scholars discover the secret to […]

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Black Scat Books has released a free Peek-A-Book of “An Interview with Horace Ballantine,” from my upcoming collection The Snowman Three Doors Down. The veteran cartoonist has to contend with an interviewer who never heard of comic strips, and it’s not easy for either of them. You can download a PDF here. (Posted by Doug […]

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For anyone looking for new poetic forms, I offer the anagram rhyme. Instead of rhyming lines with words ending with the same phonemes, it uses anagrams. Here are four quadriliteral quatrains: When Peter heard the church bell peal, He shut his eyes, prepared to leap. Priscilla, features drawn and pale, Called out a final anguished […]

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The Cocktail Hour is now available! This classic cocktail guide from 1927 contains 224 recipes collected by Marcel Requien, and a running commentary on the proper drink (and etiquette) for every hour of the day by Lucien Farnoux-Reynaud. The bilingual edition from Corps Reviver includes the original French text, an English translation by Doug Skinner […]

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I like the idea of a magazine devoted to only one book, particularly one that has now become so unpopular. A Wake Newslitter was devoted entirely to Finnegans Wake. Back in 1964, Joyce buffs across the globe sent in their discoveries to Fritz Senn (in Unterengstringen, Switzerland) and Clive Hart (in Newcastle, Australia). Senn and […]

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The three Parnassus plays – The Pilgrimage to Parnassus and the two parts of The Return from Parnassus – were written from 1598 to 1601, and performed at St. John’s College at Cambridge as, as the plays themselves say, “Christmas toys.” All three follow the adventures of two students, Philomusus and Studioso, as they face […]

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