Rhys Hughes

Rhys Henry Hughes (born 1966, Cardiff, Wales) is a Welsh fantasy writer and essayist.[1]

Rhys Henry Hughes
Born	1966 Cardiff, Wales
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer
Nationality	British
Genre	Absurdism, Fantasy, OuLiPo, Science Fiction

Influences

Born in Cardiff, Hughes has written in a variety of forms, from short stories to novels, with a mix of influences, which include Italo Calvino, Milorad Pavić, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Flann O'Brien and Donald Barthelme, occasionally creating "highly original and chimerical monsters".[2] He has been published in Postscripts.[3]

Although he is not a member of OuLiPo, the international literary group that uses mathematics and logic to create texts that break the familiar patterns of "normal" writing, he is one of the few English-speaking practitioners of these methods. Some of his more experimental works can be considered examples of ergodic literature.[4]

His long novel Engelbrecht Again! is a sequel to Maurice Richardson's 1950 cult classic The Exploits of Engelbrecht and is the most radical of Hughes's books, making extensive use of lipograms, typographical tricks, coded passages and other OuLiPo techniques.[5]

His main project consists of authoring a 1,000-story cycle of both tightly and loosely interconnected tales.[5]

Bibliography

Novels

• The Percolated Stars: An Astro-Caffeine Romp in Three Cups Featuring Batavus Droogstoppel Merchant and Scientist and Bourgeois Monster: One Lump or Two? (RazorBlade Press; 2003)[5]
• Engelbrecht Again! (Dead Letter Press; 2008; ISBN 978-0-9796335-4-6)
• Mister Gum; Or: The Possibly Phoney Profundity of Puerility (Dog Horn Publishing; 2009)[5]
• Twisthorn Bellow (Atomic Fez Publishing; 2010; ISBN 978-0-9811597-1-3)[5]
• The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange (Meteor House; 2013; ISBN 978-0-983746-13-3)[5]
• The Young Dictator (Pillar International Publishing; 2013; ISBN 978-0-9574598-3-0)[5]
• Captains Stupendous; Or, the Fantastical Family Faraway (expansion of The Coandă Effect: A Corto Maltese Adventure) (Telos Moonrise; 2014; ISBN 978-1-84583-886-7[5]

Novellas

• Eyelidiad (1996)[2]
• Rawhead & Bloody Bones (1998)[6]
• Elusive Plato (1998)[6]
• The Crystal Cosmos (PS Publishing; December 2007; ISBN 978-1-905834-98-3)
• The Coandă Effect (Ex Occidente Press; November 2010)
• The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-291738-16-2)
• Cloud Farming in Wales (Snuggly Books; 2017)

Collections

• Worming the Harpy and Other Bitter Pills (Tartarus Press, 1995;[2] ISBN 978-1-872621-20-3)
• The Smell of Telescopes (Tartarus Press, 2000; ISBN 1-872621-44-9)[2]
• Stories from a Lost Anthology (Tartarus Press, 2002; ISBN 978-1-872621-68-5)[6]
• Nowhere Near Milk Wood (1997, expanded 2002)[6]
• Journeys Beyond Advice (2002)[6]
• A New Universal History of Infamy (2004): a parody of and homage to Jorge Luis Borges's collection A Universal History of Infamy.[6]
• At the Molehills of Madness (2006)
• The Less Lonely Planet (Humdrumming, Ltd.; May 2008; ISBN 978-1-905532-52-0)
• The Postmodern Mariner (Screaming Dreams; June 2008; ISBN 978-0-9555185-2-2)
• The Brothel Creeper (Gray Friar Press; March 2011; ISBN 978-1-906331-22-1)[7]
• Link Arms With Toads! (Chômu Press; May 2011; ISBN 978-1-907681-08-0)
• Sangria in the Sangraal (Ex Occidente Press; November 2011)
• The Truth Spinner (Wildside Press; 2012)
• The Grin of the Doll Who Ate His Mother’s Face in the Dark and Other Dreadful Tales by Lamblake Heinz (edited by Rhys Hughes) (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2012)
• Tallest Stories (Eibonvale Press; January 2013; ISBN 978-1-908125-16-3)
• The Just Not So Stories (Exaggerated Press; October 2013; ISBN 978-1-291558-20-3)
• More Than a Feline (Gloomy Seahorse Press; December 2013; ISBN 978-1-291619-27-0)
• Flash in the Pantheon (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-291731-03-3)
• Rhysop's Fables (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-291738-73-5)
• The Lunar Tickle (2014)
• The Senile Pagodas (2014)
• Bone Idle in the Charnel House (2014)
• Orpheus on the Underground (Tartarus Press, 2015)
• Thirty Tributes to Calvino (Gloomy Seahorse Press, 2015)
• Mirrors in the Deluge (2015) (Elsewhen Press, 2015)
• Brutal Pantomimes (Egaeus Press, 2016)
• The Seashell Contract (2017) (Gloomy Seahorse Press, 2017)
• Salty Kiss Island (Immanion Press, 2017)
• World Muses (Ex Occidente, 2017)
• Yule Do Nicely (Gloomy Seahorse Press, 2017)
• How Many Times? (Eibonvale Press, 2018)
• The Honeymoon Gorillas (Bizarro Pulp Press, 2018)
• The Early Bird Catches the Worm but the Wise Worm Stays in Bed (Gloomy Seahorse Press, 2018)

Original foreign language books

• Em Busca do Livro de Areia (selection in Portuguese translation, 2005)
• A Sereia de Curitiba (short fiction in Portuguese translation, 2007)
• La Déconfiture d'Hypnos (selection in French translation, forthcoming 2014)

Poetry

• The Gloomy Seahorse (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-291715-03-3)

eBooks

• Better the Devil (2010)
• The Astral Disruptor (2010)
• The Phantom Festival (2011)
• Scamps of Disorder (2011)
• The Tellmenow Isitsöornot (2011)
• The Polo Match (2011)
• Young Tales of the Old Cosmos (2011)
• The World Idiot (2011)
• Facets of Faraway (2012)
• The Mermaid Variations (2012)
• Ten Tributes to Calvino (2012)

References

1. "Rhys Hughes". The Internet Speculative Fiction Database. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
2. S. T. Joshi. Icons of Horror And the Supernatural: An Encyclopedia of our Worst Nightmares - Volume 1. Greenwood Press. p. 368. ISBN 0-313-33781-0.
3. "Lists, etc". SF Site. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
4. Supernatural Fiction Writers: Peter ... Google Books. Retrieved 1 November 2011.
5. "Hughes, Rhys". the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Retrieved 27 October 2017.
6. John Clute (2016). Pardon This Intrusion. Orion. p. 169. ISBN 978-1-4732-1979-3.
7. See review of Brothel Creeper at The Future Fire

External links

• The Spoons That Are My Ears!, Rhys Hughes's weblog
• Rhys Hughes, the man who laughs at goldfish, interview by Steve Redwood