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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The sixth issue of TYPO is now available from Black Scat Books! This issue weighs in at 169 pages, edited by Norman Conquest, and loaded with “prototypes, visual poetry, Belgian fiction, chronograms, Symbolist decadence, vintage surrealism & much more. Featuring an international cast of artists, poets, and writers, including: Frédéric Acquaviva; Terry J. Bradford; Apollo […]

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From The Potato Farm, here are the first four stanzas of “The Sasquatch and the Jackalope.” As astute readers will notice, it’s about photography, and is written in embraced quatrains (ABBA), with the stanzas alternating masculine and feminine rhymes. THE SASQUATCH AND THE JACKALOPE We have a stirring tale to tell, Of how two creatures, […]

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My translation of Charles Cros’s prose works, The Science of Love, is now available from Wakefield Press. From the publisher: The Science of Love and Other Writings brings together for the first time in English all the literary prose of Charles Cros. An indefinable polymath of fin-de-siécle Paris, Cros’s imagination had one foot in the […]

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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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