Rhys Hughes

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Rhys Hughes's Latest Book

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  • Bibliography:
    55 Books
  • First Book:
    November 1998
  • Latest Book:
    September 2023
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Book List in Order: 55 titles

  • Rawhead and Blody Bones & Elusive Plato

    Rawhead and Bloody Bones - the story of two dead entertainers and their tour of Europe.Elusive Plato - the story of a lesbian trapped in a man's body and his/her search for real love.A magical blend of surreal fantasy, grotesque imagery, bizarre char...

  • Nowhere Near Milkwood

    Milkwood is not a nice place to be. With the passing of generations, it has curdled. At night it casts a buttery light on the moon. Fortunately, all the action in this book occurs elsewhere. It mostly happens in a warped version of the music industry...

  • Engelbrecht, Again

    Engelbrecht is a dwarf surrealist boxer who does most of his fighting against clocks. His exploits were first chronicled by Maurice Richardson back in the 1940s in the pages of the esteemed Lilliput magazine. Engelbrecht is the most famous member of ...

  • The New Universal History of Infamy

    From 1933 to 1934, Jorge Luis Borges, the master of fiction whose work would change the literary world, published a series of "falsifications and distortions" in the Buenos Aires newspaper Critica. These "falsifications" used as their starting point ...

  • Engelbrecht, Again!

  • Castor on Troubled Waters

    in Fast Ships, Black Sails

    Do you love the sound of a peg leg stomping across a quarterdeck? Or maybe you prefer a parrot on your arm, a strong wind at your back? Adventure, treasure, intrigue, humor, romance, danger -- and, yes, plunder. Oh, the Devil does love a pirate -- an...

  • Twisthorn Bellow

    Twisthorn Bellow: He's dynamite -- and he has a short fuse! 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 offi...

  • The Brothel Creeper

    20 STORIES OF SEXUAL AND SPIRITUAL TENSION . . . From the whorehouses of Cardiff to the jungles of Brazil, from the catacombs of Paris to the pearly gates of Heaven, along the coasts of Equatorial Africa to the screaming chaos of Hell on Earth, wande...

  • Mister Gum

    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 N...



  • Link Arms with Toads!

    Self-reflective mirrors looking for their own reflections. Towns that migrate to the moon. Prisoners of elaborate dungeons and gigantic miniature solar systems. Robots, ghosts, rascals, explorers, troubadours, apemen and yetis. All are present in the...

  • Flash in the Pantheon

    A collection of 123 flash fictions by a writer who has made his reputation as a devoted champion of the short story form. None of the stories in this book are longer than 999 words; most are under 500 words; some are less than 100. The very short sto...

  • Young Tales of the Old Cosmos

    A quartet of celestial stories about the troubles and triumphs of the planets, moons, stars and galaxies, all of which turn out to be sentient and sensitive living beings. Yes, the heavenly objects have feelings too and they find life just as bewilde...

  • The World Idiot

    The world is about to end. Only one free place is left in the space station that will preserve those few lucky individuals who have been judged essential to facilitate the eventual rebuilding of civilisation. Competition for this last place is fierce...

  • Facets of Faraway

    Join cult writer Rhys Hughes on a series of inventive adventures among a cast of peculiar characters, including the completely unfeasible Hogwash & Bum Note, somewhere under the rainbow way down low...Here you will find stories about incompetent expl...

  • Elusive Plato

    The story of a lesbian trapped in a man’s body and his/her search for real love....

  • Rawhead & Bloody Bones

    The story of two dead entertainers and their tour of Europe....

  • Fables of Rhysop

    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 150 amoral and irresponsible fables? There are no messages here telling you how best to live your life. That kind of t...

  • The Mermaid Variations

    Follow the adventures of an exceptional mermaid as she travels from a carnival in tropical Brazil to a land where it never stops raining, Wales; and from there to the moon, where the lunar mermaids are the wrong way around. A magical mythical tale fo...

  • Rhysop's Return

    More unhelpful and irresponsible fables from the mind that brought you Rhysop's Fables... Join an absurd host of aardvarks, ghosts, pirates, flying jellyfish, hospitals made of lemon jelly, yetis, rhino cops, slobbery kisses and many more entities in...



  • Rhysop's Fables

    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 o...

  • Tucked Away in Aragon

    An entire story-cycle in miniature. One thousand years of the remarkable magical history of a secret region of Spain where few people venture even now. Albarracín is a rose-red town tucked away in the mountains of Lower Aragon. Once the seat of an i...

  • The Truth Spinner

    Castor Jenkins is a Welshman who tells stories that may (or may not) be true...but no matter how fantastic, no one can prove they never happened! In the tradition of Lord Dunsany's "The Travel Tales of Mr. Joseph Jorkens" and Arthur C. Cl...

  • The Sticky Situations of Zwicky Fingers

    Zwicky Fingers is a giant fruit bat detective who lives in the past, present and future simultaneously. He is often consulted by the police force when there are paradoxical, lateral or impossible crimes to be solved. His sticky situations are ten tri...

  • Ten Tributes to Calvino

    Ten finely-crafted tribute stories to the great writer of imaginative fantasy, Italo Calvino. Among others you will herein encounter the dictator who exported all his country's freedom until there was none left for himself; the planet where perfect h...

  • The Further Fangs of Suet Pudding

    What happens when apeman good meets marshmallow evil? That's the alarming question posed by this novella, which is a double sequel to two obscure and unlikely books, namely The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange by Rhys Hughes and The Fangs of Suet P...

  • Tallest Stories

    "If every tale told in a tavern is a tall story, then what happens when the entire universe becomes a tavern? It means that every story ever told is tall and therefore untrue, and this includes the true tales. They are all lies. But a lie is a concep...

  • The Abnormalities of Stringent Strange

    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...

  • Better the Devil

    A revised edition of a collection of stories totalling 100,000 words of fiction that span the entirety of the career of cult author Rhys Hughes.... Ghosts, vampires, mythological beings, eccentrics, mad inventors, demons and other strange beings can ...

  • The Just Not So Stories

    They said it just wasn't so. But it was! Thirty stories exploring the bizarre and curiously absurd world of cult writer Rhys Hughes. Irony-Whimsy-Paradox Aliens-Mad Scientists-Monsters Living Bicycles Trumpeters in Outer Space Wordplay Robots in Ling...



  • The Young Dictator

    Political satire at its best. Thanks to a strange set of circumstances, Jenny Khan wins the Carrington by-election and gets sent to Westminster as an MP. Partly because she holds the balance of power in a hung parliament â€" but mostly thanks to some...

  • More Than a Feline

    An illustrated volume of cat stories and poems by cult author Rhys Hughes written over the past two decades and collected together for the very first time. Do you want to know what happened when Pushkin came to Shovekin; or how the sausage dog Banger...

  • Jenny Khan

    The first book from The Young Dictator. Young Jenny Khan becomes a Member of Parliament with the assistance of Granny. But the initial taste of power is not enough. How far will she go? Absurd, bizarre and very, very funny. This book will appeal to c...

  • Journeys Beyond Advice

    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 journ...

  • Bottled Love Story

    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 ...

  • The Lunar Tickle

    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 tic...

  • Captains Stupendous

    So you want to know about the Faraway Brothers, do you?Born somewhere in Gascony, they were, in the 1880s, all three of them birthed at the same time from the same womb of the same mother.Grew up in the same household, they did too, eating the same f...

  • Captains Stupendous: Or the Fantastical Family Faraway

    So you want to know about the Faraway Brothers, do you? Born somewhere in Gascony, they were, in the 1880s, all three of them birthed at the same time from the same womb of the same mother. Grew up in the same household, they did too, eating the same...

  • Bone Idle in the Charnel House

    For more than two decades, Welsh writer Rhys Hughes has been entertaining and befuddling readers with his distinctive mix of terror, humor, fantasy, and absurdity. Although influenced by such writers as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his work i...

  • Thirty Tributes to Calvino

    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 d...



  • Mirrors in the Deluge

    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 ...

  • Sangria in the Sangraal

    An entire story-cycle in miniature. One thousand years of the remarkable magical history of a secret region of Spain where few people venture even now. Albarracín is a rose-red town tucked away in the mountains of Lower Aragon. Once the seat of a...

  • The Seashell Contract: ...and Other Stories

    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 i...

  • Salty Kiss Island

    This anthology collects for the first time Rhys Hughes’ fantastical love stories.

    What is a fantastical love story? It isn’t quite the same as an ordinary love story. The events that take place are stranger, more extreme, full of the pas...

  • Cloud Farming in Wales

    In Wales it never stops raining. Or almost never. When it does stop raining from the sky, it rains from hearts instead. Indoors as well as outdoors, the people huddle in the endless drenchings, and over time they have evolved into aquatic creature...

  • The Tellmenow Isits??ornot

    A bumper book of exactly 100 stories by a cult writer who has been highly praised by Michael Moorcock, Jeff VanderMeer, Michael Bishop, Brian Aldiss and many others. 'The Tellmenow Isits÷ornot' was a nonexistent book of tall stories that...

  • World Muses

    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, log...

  • Yule Do Nicely

    Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat, please put a penny in the old man’s hat. Yes, but we first require more information about the goose, the penny and the hat. We can’t be too careful these days. How fat is the goose getting and what c...

  • How Many Times?

    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...

  • The Early Bird Catches the Worm but the Wise Worm Stays in Bed

    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 b...



  • My Rabbit's Shadow Looks Like a Hand

    My Rabbit's shadowlooks like a handthat has contorted itself in orderto cast the shadowof a rabbit on the wall-a rabbit that looks just likethe shadow of a handcontorted to enable the castingof the shadow of arabbit on the wall... I yearn for a frien...

  • Beyond the Valley of the Doyles

    Centered around the classic fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, these three gonzo outings of steampunk surrealism bring absurd and hilarious changes to the worlds of Sherlock Holmes, archvillain Moriarty, and Professor Challenger....

  • Students of Myself

    There are few students in my class. When one considers what the subject is, this isn’t surprising. I teach myself   In other words, I impart to my students facts and fancies based on my life and ideas. It’s the least popular class in the uni...

  • ROADS LESS TRAVELLED: VOLUME 2

    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-guigno...

  • The First Rhys Hughes MEGAPACK?

    I have been enjoying the work of Welsh fantasist Rhys Hughes for quite a few years now, and it’s an honor to be publishing not one, but three MEGAPACK® collections of his indescribably excellent, of which this is the first. There is fantasy, of co...

  • ADVENTURES WITH IMMORTALITY

    Embark on a cerebral odyssey into the realms of the infinite with: ADVENTURES WITH IMMORTALITY - Short Tales of LongevityIn this thought-provoking collection, Rhys Hughes unveils eleven mesmerizing narratives that delve deep into the recesses of eter...

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Rhys Hughes has published 55 books.

Rhys Hughes does not have a new book coming out soon. The latest book, ADVENTURES WITH IMMORTALITY, was published in September 2023.

The first book by Rhys Hughes, Rawhead and Blody Bones & Elusive Plato, was published in November 1998.

No. Rhys Hughes does not write books in series.
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