Tiffany Thayer, founder of the Fortean Society, was often criticized for his novels, which tended to the trashy. Nobody could say, however, that he couldn’t bring one to a glorious close. His Dr. Arnoldi (1934) is a memorably disgusting piece of science fiction about what happens when people stop dying. The terminally ill remain ill […]

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The fifteenth issue of The Black Scat Review is out! This one is subtitled “More Utter Nonsense,” and includes my poem “Pan and Kettle,” as well as my translations of two monologues by Charles Cros, “The Man with His Feet Turned Around” and “The Man Who Made a Discovery.” The other contributors are Edward Ahern, […]

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Sleepytime Cemetery is now available! In the words of Black Scat Books, “In this new collection of short stories by the author of The Doug Skinner Dossier, you’ll discover a world of ostensibly human specimens behaving in peculiar and unpredictable ways. However, they are often recognizable in a manner we dare not admit. Skinner’s dark […]

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Bill Ectric has interviewed me about my translation of The Zombie of Great Peru, by Pierre-Corneille Blessebois, published earlier this year by Black Scat Books. It’s over at a site called Red Fez. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

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Black Scat Books has just released its eighth broadside, “Limerickshaw: Haiku for the John.” I’ve selected sixteen classic dirty limericks, and rewritten them as haiku. Cleansed of rhyme, each haiku reveals the laconic narrative at the core. Norman Conquest’s design incorporates an equally classic erotic Japanese print, showing a heteronormative couple generating children. It’s suitable […]

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The eighth issue of Black Scat Review is now out!  It contains my short but unpleasant story “Hardwood Mulch,” as well as seductive works by Suzanne Burns, Doug Rice, Steven Teref, Kurt Cline, Charles Holdefer, Paulo Brito, Jhaki M.S. Landgrebe,Tara Stillions Whitehead, Maria Morisot, Fox Harvard, Charlie Griggs, Monika Mori, and Tom Whalen.  You can find […]

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Georges Perec followed his masterful novel La Disparition, a lipogram without the letter E, with Les Revenentes, which avoided all vowels except E.  And Les Revenentes is hilarious, bending all rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax in its rigorous pursuit of univocalism (and becoming increasingly smutty in the process). But there is a stray O.  […]

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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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