Rhys Hughes

Rhys Henry Hughes
Rhys Hughes
Born	24 September 1966 (1966-09-24) (age 43) 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.^[1] 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.^[2]

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.^[3]

His main project consists of authoring a 1,000-story cycle of both tightly and loosely interconnected tales. Hughes calls this cycle a "wheel", which in turn is formed by smaller "wheels within wheels".^[4] In October 2009, Hughes wrote his 500^th story. The linear sequence was disrupted when author Michael Bishop offered to write Hughes's 612^th tale, a number picked at random. That story now serves as Bishop's introduction to Hughes's short novel The Crystal Cosmos.^[5]

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^[6], and the Greek version of A New Universal History of Infamy is radically different from the English original.^[7]

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.

Hughes is also a regular performer of his own poetry and in October 2006 won Swansea's first Open Slam Poetry Competition.^[8]

In addition to fiction and poetry, Hughes has published many articles on a variety of topics, including literary criticism. He is currently working on a critical biography of author Michael Moorcock.

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)

Novellas

• Eyelidiad (1996)
• Rawhead & Bloody Bones (1998)
• Elusive Plato (1998)
• The Crystal Cosmos (PS Publishing; December 2007; ISBN 978-1-905834-98-3)

Collections

• Worming the Harpy (1995)
• The Smell of Telescopes (2000)
• Stories from a Lost Anthology (2002)
• 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 Impossible Inferno (forthcoming 2010)
• The Phantom Festival (forthcoming 2010)
• Mirrors in the Deluge (forthcoming 2011)

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)

Chapbooks

• Romance with Capsicum (1995)
• In Praise of Ridicule (2003)
• The Skeleton of Contention: Short Stories of Absurdist Fiction (Whispers of Wickedness; October 2004)
• Madonna Park (2009)
• Plutonian Parodies (2009)
• The Fanny Fables (forthcoming 2009)
• To Err is Divine (forthcoming 2009)
• Flash in the Pantheon (forthcoming 2010)

Books in Preparation

• Tallest Stories
• My Cholesterol Socks
• The Clown of the New Eternities
• Wuthering Depths
• Djinn Septic
• Unevensong
• Fists of Fleece
• Your Saturated Stockings
• 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
• The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange
• Taurus of Nemedia
• The Scamps of Disorder
• Soft Wine
• Our Malignant Slippers
• The Book of Lladloh
• Occam's Beard
• Suppers at the Periodic Table
• The Just Not So Stories
• My Big Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales
• The Knight of Whatever

References

External links

• The Spoons That Are My Ears!, Rhys Hughes's weblog
• An Interview with Rhys Hughes, by Anthony Brockway
• Polluto: The Anti-Pop Culture Journal official website