TYPO #5 is now available to be gawked at and puzzled over! I contributed an essay (“Typoglyphics”), a short story (“The Butler Bulli0n”), a “Bilingual Acrostic Rebus,” and translations of Tabarin and Théophile Gautier. My distinguished colleagues in this issue are Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Bradley, Anton Chekhov, Norman Conquest, Caroline Crépiat, R J Dent, […]

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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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TYPO 4 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed an article on typos of the word “typo” (“Typo’s Typos”) and a translation of “Cubist Tale” by Gabriel de Lautrec. My fellow contributors are Tim Newton Anderson, Michael Betancourt, David Brizer, Steve Carll, Norman Conquest, Farewell Debut, R J Dent, Jesse Glass, Reinhard Goering, […]

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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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A melancholy poem from Bed Bug. LORD BEDBUG Lord Bedbug crawls upon his throne Of spattered sheets and spotted ticking, Where he commands the nightly pricking That makes our vital force his own. Ah, have you now seen Bedbug plain? And has he used you for his feeding, And stuffed his gut with all the […]

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Bed Bug: A Magazine of the Arts is now available from Black Scat Books! Here’s the description from its editor, Norman Conquest: As the world comes to an end, and the bed bug infestation spreads from France throughout Europe, it is time for a journal devoted to infestation, invasion, and chaos. Featuring works by Alphonse […]

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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 very short story, from my upcoming collection The Potato Farm. IMPASSE “I have nothing to say,” he said. “Who asked you?” she asked. “I won’t dignify that with a reply,” he replied. “Then I have nothing more to add,” she added.

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Kiarna Boyd asked me to narrate her novel Blessed and Cursed Alike, to celebrate the tenth anniversary of its publication. I called in Brian Dewan as engineer, and we managed to record the whole book in four days (not in a row). Kiarna has released the first chapter here. More will follow! Sex, violence, magic, […]

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