Bøger af Rhys Hughes

Welcome to Volume 2 of Roads Less Travelled.This time around we've got the amazing, unusual, gloriously inventive Rhys Hughes, with a story that has been many years in the making.In addition, there's a marvellously conceived and executed grand-guignol of a story from rising star, Susan York.I've interviewed both authors, and their comments and views make absorbing reading. It's interesting to contrast their different approaches and opinions on the art of writing and promoting.The mix is completed with bibliographies and photographs.So, without further ado, turn the page and enjoy the show!Oh, and if you haven't done so already, check out Volume 1, featuring Gary Couzens and Ralph Robert Moore: https: //www.midnightstreetpress.com/roads-less-travelled-1

A short novel consisting of more than eighty linked fictions, each concerning the magical, metaphysical, whimsical and ironic adventures of a woman from a different country and culture, and her interactions with the world, with time, space, love, logic and impulse, and with the narrator who exists in many different dimensions at the same time.

Marco Polo is travelling again in the service of Kublai Khan but this time he wanders off the path and ends up in an unknown part of the world. In his solitude he becomes an emperor of dreams. The ghosts of prehistory visit him, and the phantoms of later ages and the future too. He even finds himself in the unexpected position of haunting himself. Only his very last spectral guest can know everything that is essential, and that last guest may well be you, the reader.

A collection of previously unpublished stories by a highly regarded writer of modern speculative fiction. The seashell contract is binding on the human race. Once it is signed, the ocean will grow warmer and storms rage across the land. Other tales involve the longest chopsticks, a man who falls afoul of the sons of the sea, the first selfie photograph ever taken and its unexpected consequences, the man who swallowed an apple pip in order to grow a tree in his stomach, and the sasquatch who went to work in an office... 22 stories in total and all for a good cause. The author's profits from the sale of this book will go to The Mariposa Trust, a charity that supports mothers and families who have lost babies... "It's a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes' fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists. " -JEFF VANDERMEER "Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature... As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Mervyn Peake's glorious invention, something of John Cowper Powys's contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He's as tricky as his own characters... He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef's sardonic confections, certainly not in English." - MICHAEL MOORCOCK "Every Hughes story implies much, served with wit and whimsy and word-relish, high spirits and bittersweet twists." - IAN WATSON "A dazzling disintegration of the reality principle. A rite of passage to the greater world beyond common sense. Raises the bar on profundity and sets a comic standard for the tragic limits of our human experience. Like Beckett on nitrous oxide. Like Kafka with a brighter sense of humour." - A.A. ATTANASIO "Hughes' world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all." - T.E.D. KLEIN "There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes' fiction; it's so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered." - JEFFREY FORD

The picaresque exploits of a knight on a bicycle... The noble and chivalrous Don Cosquillas (more informally known as Arturo Risas of Madrid) hereby invites you to partake of his adventures as he roams with his trusty sidekick Sancho Panda over Spain and across Africa and all the way to India and the back of beyond. Metafictional and ticklish, he assures you that he has your best interests at heart and if you care to accompany him through these pages you will be richly rewarded, though in what manner he is quite at a loss to specify. No matter! Here be dragons, puppet masters, and all manner of curiosities and hobgoblins. "Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature. As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef's sardonic confections, certainly not in English." - MICHAEL MOORCOCK "If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes's style - with all that means - is among the most beautiful I've encountered in several years." - SAMUEL R. DELANY

A selection of previously uncollected short stories from a highly regarded author of speculative fiction. The work presented here samples two distinct periods: the beginning of a career and its fast approaching conclusion. The early stories tend to be more conventional fantasies, the later are more experimental. But most are whimsical and all are ironic.

A book of implausible adventures featuring absurdities, anachronisms, exaggerations, outrageous puns, pirates, mythological beings, giant cups of tea, gingersnap moons, and the occasional metafictional trick. Travel with Castor Jenkins. Globigerina Ooze, Gaston Thumper Bonesoup and the Postmodern Mariner himself into worlds undreamed of by sane people!

Quirky poetry in the light-hearted tradition of Richard Brautigan, Don Marquis, Hilaire Belloc, Blaise Cendrars and Edward Lear. 133 verses and prose poems ranging in length from one-sentence quips to absurdist ballads. Space, time, love, journeys, fruit, the thoughts and feelings of inanimate objects and monsters are among the themes covered.

Mirrors in the Deluge is a collection of 32 unrelated stories that take elements from fantasy, science fiction, horror and other genres and give them a lateral shift. Like much of Rhys' work these quirky tales between them encompass parody, pastiche and puns. The fun, as ever, starts with the title of each story - gently leading an unsuspecting reader into preconceived ideas and expectations; expectations that are soon spun around, turned on their head (or other extremities), and pushed in an unexpected direction. Thus, a saunter merely through the contents page is already a hugely entertaining experience and one more akin to savouring the hors d'oeuvres of a grand feast than consulting a list of shortcuts into a literary tome. In fact, the gastronomic metaphor serves us well here; the courses on offer range from tantalising tuck to a gourmand's repast, but never mere vittles - perhaps the way to enjoy this book is to digest one story, three times a day (four if you're a halfling who needs second breakfast), rather than trying to gorge on all the available delights and delicacies at one sitting. To complete this gourmet's guide, a tempting sampling of the stories must include: The Soft Landing, a unique story told from the perspective of a photon; Travels with my Antinomy, how do you solve a paradox when you're part of it?; Vanity of Vanities, the internet achieves consciousness and takes over, but with very different consequences than you might imagine; The Fairy and the Dinosaur, in which a fairy can't find what she wants for her picnic in the goblin market, is offered cloned prehistoric plums but turns to a time-travelling robot to go back to the age of the dinosaurs and eat an original plum. Other titles to tempt you include The Martian Monocles, The Prodigal Beard, A Dame Abroad, The Unkissed Artist Formerly Known as Frog, The Goat That Gloated, The Taste of Turtle Tears, The Bones of Jones, and The Haggis Eater.

The world has never seen an aviator quite like Stringent Strange. Half man, half ape, half badly added fraction, he can fly anything with wings and many things without. Under the mentorship of the unorthodox genius Professor Tobias Crinkle, our hairy hero soon gets much more than he bargains for when he finds himself up against a fiendish Nazi plot to invade and conquer America before the war has even begun! Fortunately there exists an invention that can help him fight back against the warlike scoundrels, but the consequences of using it will propel him into even greater peril, into an alternative future where the themes and tropes of early magazine science fiction are menacingly real and coexist in perfect disharmony! Into a bracing reality where the only weapons he can rely on are the three special abnormalities he was born with... Come and join Stringent Strange in a stupendous, mysterious, inventive adventure set in a far-flung time When Pulps Collide! Rhys Hughes is the acclaimed cult author of 20 books and more than 600 short stories. His work has been highly praised by Michael Moorcock, Michael Bishop, Mike Mignola and possibly other Michaels too. His first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995 and achieved massive critical acclaim for its inventiveness and originality. Since then he has continued to experiment with science fiction, fantasy, fables, whimsy, humour, and metafiction with increasing success. Half of him is too clever by half; the other half does what it can to normalize the total.

There are few students in my class. When one considers what the subject is, this isn't surprising. I teach myself. I impart to my students facts and fancies based on my life and ideas. They have to write a short piece about how I spend my free time. But this is information I've always kept secret. I read the essays anxiously.

Rhys Hughes plumbs the depths of perversity and satire in the shockingly brilliant novel Mister Gum, which follows the adventures of the world's most notorious creative writing tutor and his friends. On his way he discovers haunted hymens, Fellatio Nelson and Canon Alberic's Photo Album. 'A desperately needed antidote to nerd-friendly space fiction and inklingoid fantasy.' - The Guardian. 'Hughes' fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumph-antly parades across all bestseller lists.' -Jeff Vandermeer

Thornton Excelsior is a man but he's not an individual, he's a multitude, an ensemble of avatars of himself that can exist in any place at any time. His mission is to do all possible things and most impossible ones. Give him a feather and he will tickle the moon until it laughs; give him a laugh and he will sell it in the market for a story; give him a story and he will give you a book of them. This book. A book to make full moons giggle. "Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet's literature... As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He's as tricky as his own characters... He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. Few living fictioneers approach this chef's sardonic confections, certainly not in English." - MICHAEL MOORCOCK

Rhys Hughes has never been a stranger to experimental fiction and unusual ways of constructing stories, and this mini-collection gathers some of his most far-reaching examples, placed squarely in the world of OuLiPo writing. Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or the workshop of potential literature, OuLiPo is a grouping of authors who fashion works based on constrained writing techniques - writing that follows rigorous and extremely precise rules concerning structure and layout etc. And here, we encounter works based on rigid numerical constraints, works in the form of grids that can be read in any direction, and a "logico-erotic tale in which the permutations of the sexual acts are based on the workings of logic gates."The intricacy of construction within these carefully defined restraints is stunning but the resulting literary world is still very much the author's own, filled with his characteristic sense of humour, the absurd and the fantastical. This is a slim but large-format book to give space for all the complex layouts, grids, structures etc. that make up these stories.

Rhys Hughes has never been a stranger to experimental fiction and unusual ways of constructing stories, and this mini-collection gathers some of his most far-reaching examples, placed squarely in the world of OuLiPo writing. Short for Ouvroir de littérature potentielle or the workshop of potential literature, OuLiPo is a grouping of authors who fashion works based on constrained writing techniques - writing that follows rigorous and extremely precise rules concerning structure and layout etc. And here, we encounter works based on rigid numerical constraints, works in the form of grids that can be read in any direction, and a "logico-erotic tale in which the permutations of the sexual acts are based on the workings of logic gates."The intricacy of construction within these carefully defined restraints is stunning but the resulting literary world is still very much the author's own, filled with his characteristic sense of humour, the absurd and the fantastical. This is a slim but large-format book to give space for all the complex layouts, grids, structures etc. that make up these stories.

A collection of thirty stories inspired by the genius of the writer Italo Calvino... Paradoxical and philosophical fables; impossible cartographies and labyrinths of the mind and heart; towers that stretch across the universe; men who set sail on domestic oceans; the opinions and hopes of the sun; sentient geometries; games with gravity and planets; metafiction and wordplay; recursion and exploration; the perplexities of logic and desire. These thirty tribute stories demonstrate the whimsical inventiveness and originality of an author who has won considerable acclaim for his speculative fiction.

Love can't be bottled but it might arrive in a bottle... Love is a game like chess but with smiles, winks, laughs and kisses for pieces... Love is a problem. Is there a solution? Cult author Rhys Hughes answers this question and resolves all the paradoxes in his new novelette. Join the woman who has no need for romance and the sailor from another age as they simultaneously attempt to accept and avoid the designs of destiny.

Tired of being given good advice in fables and parables by wise men, sages and gurus? Why not try Rhysop's Fables instead, a set of 207 unhelpful and irresponsible fables? There are no messages here telling you how best to live your life. That kind of thing is entirely up to you! The philosophy of Rhysop's Fables is that there are no answers to life because life is not a question... Join a cast of crows, clouds, aardvarks, snails, robots, foxes, dinosaurs, ghosts, pickle jars and many other beings and things in the great quest to fail to unravel the mysteries of existence! You won't regret it; and even if you do, you won't regret your regret!

It may come as no surprise that France wants to take over the world again. But this time they plan to go much further and gain control of the spiritual dimensions too, making French the official language of the Afterlife! Twisthorn Bellow is a freshly baked golem who has fallen into a vat of nitro-glycerine, turning him into a living stick of dynamite. As well as battling against monsters and rock musicians, he's the only thing that can preserve and protect the glorious British Empire and prevent the Frenchification of the entire cosmos. But considering the French have all the best ideas and tunes, he doesn't stand a soufflé in Hell's chance!

A collection of weird tales, monstrous fantasies and ghostly novelettes, some of them inspired by H. P. Lovecraft but cross-pollinated with Jorge Luis Borges and William Hope Hodgson. Nearly all the stories are about doomed souls who set out on journeys for which they will find reasons to regret. Includes the acclaimed novella 'The World Beyond the Stairwell'. "'The World Beyond the Stairwell' may well be the finest tribute (with love) to Hodgson ever written." - JOHN CLUTE