Yule Do Nicely

Yule Do Nicely (2017)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

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 connection does it have with the old man? Is the goose getting so fat that it is likely to explode with disastrous results for the nation? How will paying the old man a penny prevent this outcome? The situation is unclear.

We are on more certain ground when it is explained that the following fictions have been assembled in their present form in order to celebrate the festive season. They include work from the span of the past quarter century. The first twenty-four tales form a weird advent calendar from December 1st to 24th. Then it is Christmas Day and time for the stocking and the twenty-eight little strange tales inside it. Merry Xmas!

Contents:

The Hidden Sixpence * Three Friends * Down in the Park * The Chocolate Princess * Loafing Around * The Duvet Thief * My Beetroot Brow * The Moon and the Well * His Unstable Shape * The Cakes of Gehenna * Double Atlas * The Dirtiest Ararat * Zucchini Overdrive * Suttee and Sweep * The Strongest Monster * Cats' Eyes * Fringes and Bangs * Monsieur Choux * A Corking Tale * Don't Shoot the Messenger * All the Waiting * The Wrong Lamp *The Pancake Hurler * The Precious Mundanity * The Shocking Stocking

Note: 'The Shocking Stocking' is a portmanteau tale incorporating 28 little fictions.

World Muses

World Muses (2017)
Ex Occidente

"The world is a ball and our minds are a room and our lives are an endless dance in the ballrooms of forsaken palaces on those smaller worlds called our hearts, where seismic activity is almost constant, for the geology of our emotions is still young. The volcanic upthrusts of our yearnings make mountains out of our hopes and inspiration shakes the earth and collapses it beneath us and we wish for our fears to turn out to be groundless too. And sometimes indeed they are."

Contents:

World Muses (a series of eighty linked fictions)

Salty Kiss Island

Salty Kiss Island (2017)
Immanion Press

"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 passion of originality, invention and magic, as well as an intensification of emotional love. Also, the voice that tells them has rather a different tone to a conventional romantic narrator. The stories in Salty Kiss Island are set in this world and others, spanning the spectrum of possible and impossible experiences, the uncharted territories of yearning, the depths and shoals of the heart, mind and soul. They are adventure yarns, whimsies and comedies, tragedies and paradoxes. They are melancholy, gleeful, philosophic or mystical. A love of language runs through them, parallel to the love that motivates their characters to feats of preposterous heroism, luminous lunacy and grandiose gesture. They include tales of minstrels and their catastrophic serenades, dreamers sinking into sequences of ever-deeper dreams, goddesses and mermaids, sailors and devils, messages in bottles that can think and speak but never be read, shadows with an independent life and voyagers of distant galaxies who are already at their destinations before they arrive."

Contents:

Foreword * All for Nothing * Accordion Beach * The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart * Paradise Discarded * Eternal Horizon * Starlight Girl * The Cargo Cults of Salty Kiss Island * The Sweetheart Rosary * Venus and Stupid * The Mermaid Variations * Message to Rosita * Left on the Shelf * The Cure of the Scandal in Averroës * Love Keys * The Requirements of Desire * The Sublime Voyage of Ariana Aragão * Died For Puns * As I Walked Out One Midsummer Night's Dream * Don Entrerrosca * A Spaceship in the Shape of a Woman * An Unpleasant Romance * What the Shadow Sees * Afterword

Cloud Farming in Wales

Cloud Farming in Wales (2017)
Snuggly Books

"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 creatures who only look and behave like men and women but aren’t really. There is a clue in the name of the country. Wales is a nation with no spot of dry land within its borders. Wales is an Atlantis that never stayed under but is just as wet. Crammed with mythical beings and happenings, Cloud Farming in Wales palpitates, germinates and extrapolates, but never evaporates, and the sodden heroes that wade and slosh through the mighty puddles of its pages are generally in search of a canoe."

The Seashell Contract

The Seashell Contract (2017)
Gloomy Seahorse Press

"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 involve the longest chopsticks, a man who falls afoul of the sons of the sea, the first selfie photograph ever taken and its unexpected consequences, the man who swallowed an apple pip in order to grow a tree in his stomach, and the sasquatch who went to work in an office... 22 stories in total and all for a good cause. The author's profits from the sale of this book will go to The Mariposa Trust, a charity that supports mothers and families who have lost babies..."

Contents:

Chopsticks * The Seashell Contract * The Belly Orchard * Billy Holiday on Vacation * The Waters of Fosretaweht * Four Agora Corners * The Salsa Raft * Galaxy Whispers * A Comedy of Gambits * The Bus Museum * Why Look at Me Smugly? * Heavy Rain on a Slow Train * The Monumental Mason * The Promotion * The International Geophysical Ear * Junkshop in Oestrus * The Kizomba Wanderers * Where Everyone Wins * The Four Sea Sons * The Kind of Man * The Selfie Habit * The Workplace Hugger