Rhys Hughes

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

Rhys Henry Hughes (born 1966, Cardiff, Wales) is a Welsh fantasy/horror writer and essayist.

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". 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. 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".

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 (Meteor House; May 2013; ISBN 978-0-983746-13-3)
• The Young Dictator (Pillar International Publishing; October 2013; ISBN 978-0-9574598-3-0)
• Captains Stupendous September 2014; ISBN 978-1-84583-886-7

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)
• The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers (Gloomy Seahorse Press; 2014; ISBN 978-1-291738-16-2)

Collections

• Worming the Harpy and Other Bitter Pills (Tartarus Press, 1995; ISBN 978-1-872621-20-3)
• The Smell of Telescopes (Tartarus Press, 2000; ISBN 1-872621-44-9)
• Stories from a Lost Anthology (Tartarus Press, 2002; ISBN 978-1-872621-68-5)
• 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 978-0-9555185-2-2)
• 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)
• The Truth Spinner (Wildside 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

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)

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