TYPO 9 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed a translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “The Crocodile and the Ostrich,” from my upcoming translation of his book Feeding Time. Caroline Crépiat drew a lovely illustration for it, as only she can. My fellow contributors are a stellar bunch: Chiara Ambrosio, Robert Archambeau, Pierre […]

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The Virtuoso Parrot is now available from Black Scat Books! Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet (1828-1900) wrote hundreds of startling articles and stories about secret societies, hidden bloodlines, and his own idiosyncratic views of history. His obsession with finding puns and rebuses, in both ancient inscriptions and modern speech, influenced generations of occultists; it was the inspiration […]

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TYPO 8 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed “A Biliteral Alphabet” and a translation of “The Virtuoso Parrot,” a short story by the enigmatic 19th century writer Claude-Sosthène Grasset d’Orcet. I’m surrounded by an international crowd of poets, essayists, fictioneers, and artists: Tim Newton Anderson, Tom Barrett, Terry Bradford, Steve Carll, Peter […]

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Behold! A review of Music From Elsewhere, by Louis Pattison, in the November 2024 issue of The Wire. (Please click for magnification.)

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Music From Elsewhere is now available from Strange Attractor Press! This book collects and discusses music derived from unusual sources, including music attributed to fairies, trolls, trowies, banshees, aliens, angels, spirits, time slips, and dreams. You’ll also find chapters on speculative and cryptographic music, and on music from birds and other natural sounds. It’s 272 […]

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This story appears in my collection The Potato Farm. How does one go about painting a cockatrice, anyway? Here’s how it begins: PAINTING THE COCKATRICE I was working on a painting of a cockatrice, and was faced with a dilemma. Its gaze is lethal, which meant that if I painted it well, I would die. […]

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I wrote the introduction for Amanda DeMarco’s sparkling translation of New Inventions and the Latest Innovations, by Gaston de Pawlowski, now available from Wakefield Press. Here’s what Wakefield has to say: Originally published in book form in 1916, Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations collects the humorist’s numerous columns mocking and deflating […]

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TYPO 7 is now available from Black Scat Books! I contributed a set of silent pieces (“Eleven Silent Études”); translations of two stories by Alphonse Allais (“Gaudissart Has Fun” and “The Theater of Mr. Bigfun”), both taken from My Rent Is Due; and a translation of Raymond Roussel’s first work in prose (“Chroniquettes”). This rollicking […]

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I’m happy to announce that my translation of Alphonse Allais’s My Rent Is Due! is now available from Black Scat Books. This collection, originally published in 1899, includes delightful stories about tapeworms, phantom limbs, floating brothels, and other interesting things. André Breton saluted Allais’s “terrorist activity of the mind”; maybe you will too.

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This affecting tale of a young poet who loses the rights to his work appears in the latest issue of TYPO. Optional technical note for logophiles: “Uncopyrightable” is one of the longest heterograms in English, consisting of fifteen unrepeated letters. Each paragraph is 60 words, with a two-word anagram of the title in the middle. […]

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