Here, as a Christmas treat, is the story of “The Monkey and the Parrot,” written by Alphonse Allais in 1899, and translated by the undersigned this afternoon. THE MONKEY AND THE PARROT Speaking of parrots, do you know the Persian fable of “The Monkey and the Parrot,” a story both ingenious and rich in instruction […]

[Read more →]

Readers of Raymond Roussel’s penultimate work, Nouvelles Impressions d’Afrique, are faced with a problem. The work is built on a system of nested parentheses, and they’re hard to negotiate. Some readers have built machines, or used card files; I found it easier to make a map, which I could then check to find my way […]

[Read more →]

We have here another early edition of “Authors”; I found it without a box, so can offer no information on date or publisher.  Dickens seems to be sporting unruly hair and beard in this portrait.  The other writers in the pantheon this time are: Longfellow, Irving, Cooper, Scott, Holmes, and Burns. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

[Read more →]

This early edition of “Authors” dispenses with the writers’ portraits, offering instead these colorful and decorative designs.  The authors represented are Ouida, Thomas Carlyle, Wilkie Collins, and George Eliot. (Posted by Doug Skinner)

[Read more →]

Black Scat Books has just released my translation of Isidore Isou’s “Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara,” as the eighth of their elegant little chapbooks, “Absurdist Texts and Documents.” Isidore Isou is little known to American readers, and few of his writings have been translated.  In the late 1940s, he founded a […]

[Read more →]

We return to that interesting character, Benjamin De Casseres.  There are only a few pictures of him online: a caricature, for example, and a photo of him celebrating the 21st Amendment.  So, here’s a portrait of De Casseres with his wife Bio. The picture is taken from his 1931 book, Love Letters of a Living […]

[Read more →]

Ray Palmer is one of my favorite editors.  He took over the early science fiction pulp, Amazing Stories, in the ’30s; and turned it into an extremely unusual magazine in the ’40s, when he published the hallucinatory output of Richard Shaver.  (We’ve featured Shaver ourselves here many times, as a search will reveal.)  Readers balked […]

[Read more →]

If the melon insists on having slices, it will end up eaten by families. Boredom and idleness are, I think, the principal motives for devotion.  We only lift our eyes to the heavens when we have nothing to do or hope for on earth, and we only kiss holy images when we have nothing else […]

[Read more →]

“Dichter-Quartett” is an undated German edition of “Authors.”  I’ve chosen Adelbert von Chamisso, for his contributions to botany, and for the creation of Peter Schlemihl.  The other authors in this canon are: Ludwig Uhland, Joseph Victor von Scheffel, Friedrich von Schiller, Friedrich Rückert, Shakespeare, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Heinrich Heine, Ernst von Wildenbruch, Emanuel Geibel, […]

[Read more →]

I’m happy to note that one of my favorite literary hoaxes is online, which means that you can read it for free, instead of paying a lot of money for the rare original.  The Dance of Death (1877) is a remarkable polemic against the “filthy lust” of the waltz.  The author was “William Herman,” a […]

[Read more →]