Rhys Hughes

Rhys Henry Hughes
Rhys Hughes
Born	24 September 1966 (1966-09-24) Cardiff, Wales
Occupation	Novelist, Short story writer
Nationality	British
Genres	Absurdism, Fantasy, OuLiPo, Science fiction

Rhys Henry Hughes (born 24 September 1966), is a Welsh writer and essayist.

Born in Cardiff, Hughes is a prolific short story writer with an eclectic mix of influences, which include Italo Calvino, Milorad Pavić, Jorge Luis Borges, Stanisław Lem, Flann O'Brien, Felipe Alfau, Donald Barthelme and Jack Vance. Much of his work is of a humorously eccentric bent, often parodies and pastiches with surreal and absurdist overtones, although he is by no means limited to any of these forms and has proven to be extremely versatile. He has been published in Postscripts among many other places.

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. For instance his novella 'Elusive Plato' was apparently written in the 'shape of a tesseract'. Some of his more experimental works can be considered examples of ergodic literature.

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.

His main project consists of authoring a 1,000-story cycle of both tightly and loosely interconnected tales. Hughes calls this grand cycle a "wheel", which in turn is formed by smaller "wheels within wheels". In August 2011, Hughes wrote his 600th story. The linear sequence was disrupted when author Michael Bishop offered to write Hughes's 612th tale, a number picked at random. That story now serves as Bishop's introduction to Hughes's short novel The Crystal Cosmos.^{[citation needed]}

As well as publishing books in English and having those works translated, Hughes has created books especially for foreign language publishers that will never exist in English. For instance, A Sereia de Curitiba will only exist in a Portuguese version, and the Greek version of A New Universal History of Infamy is radically different from the English original.

In 2005 his was the title story in The Minotaur in Pamplona, two chapbooks published by D-Press and edited by Neil Ayres. The collection also featured a poem by Brian Aldiss. He has had several short stories published in the Nemonymous anthologies.

Bibliography

Novels

• The Percolated Stars (2003)
• Engelbrecht Again! (Dead Letter Press; October 2008; ISBN 978-0-9796335-4-6)
• Mister Gum (Dog Horn Publishing; 2009)
• Twisthorn Bellow (Atomic Fez Publishing; March 2010; ISBN 978-0-9811597-1-3)
• The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange (forthcoming 2012)

Novellas

• Eyelidiad (1996)
• Rawhead & Bloody Bones (1998)
• Elusive Plato (1998)
• The Crystal Cosmos (PS Publishing; December 2007; ISBN 978-1-905834-98-3)
• The Coandă Effect (Ex Occidente Press; November 2010)

Collections

• Worming the Harpy (Tartarus Press, 1995; ISBN 187262120X)
• The Smell of Telescopes (Tartarus Press, 2000; ISBN 1872621449)
• Stories from a Lost Anthology (Tartarus Press, 2002; ISBN 9781872621685)
• Nowhere Near Milk Wood (2002)
• Journeys Beyond Advice (2002)
• A New Universal History of Infamy (2004)
• 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 978-0-955518-52-2)
• The Brothel Creeper (Gray Friar Press; March 2011; ISBN 978-1-906331-22-1)
• Link Arms With Toads! (Chômu Press; May 2011; ISBN 978-1-907681-08-0)
• Sangria in the Sangraal (Ex Occidente Press; November 2011)
• Tallest Stories (forthcoming 2012)
• The Impossible Inferno (forthcoming 2012)
• The Truth Spinner (forthcoming 2012)

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 2012)

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)
• Flash in the Pantheon (2011)
• Young Tales of the Old Cosmos (2011)

Books in preparation

• My Cholesterol Socks
• The Clown of the New Eternities
• Wuthering Depths
• Djinn Septic
• Unevensong
• Fists of Fleece
• Your Saturated Stockings
• Mirrors in the Deluge
• Salty Kiss Island
• The Jam of Hypnos
• Bone Idle in the Charnel-House
• The Senile Pagodas
• Ditto and Likewise
• The Pilgrim's Regress
• The Isle of Chrome
• The Sky Saw
• The Solar Weavers
• The Indigo Casbah
• Dribble as I Dawdle
• Implausible Planets
• Taurus of Nemedia
• The Young Dictator
• Soft Wine
• Our Malignant Slippers
• The Book of Lladloh
• Occam's Beard
• Captains Outrageous
• Suppers at the Periodic Table
• The Just Not So Stories
• My Big Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales
• The Knight of Whatever
• The Mischief Maker

External links

• The Spoons That Are My Ears!, Rhys Hughes's weblog
• An Interview with Rhys Hughes, by Anthony Brockway
• Rhys Hughes, the man who laughs at goldfish, interview by Steve Redwood
• Polluto: The Anti-Pop Culture Journal official website
• Rhys Hughes at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database