The Spoons That Are My Ears!

I am delighted to officially announce the publication of my book Thirty Tributes to Calvino, a collection of stories inspired and influenced by the great Italian author.

"Paradoxical and philosophical fables; impossible cartographies and labyrinths of the mind and heart; towers that stretch across the universe; men who set sail on domestic oceans; the opinions and hopes of the sun; sentient geometries; games with gravity and planets; metafiction and wordplay; recursion and exploration; the perplexities of logic and desire."

A couple of years ago I produced an ebook called Ten Tributes to Calvino. It was suggested to me that I expand the book and I agreed to do so. In fact, that ebook contains a few stories that aren't in this new book; but this new book is a more refined and (to my mind at least) satisfying "thank you" to my favourite writer.

The cover is by the divine Brankica Bozinovska and the book is dedicated to her...

It is available from Amazon and elsewhere right now, in both paperback form and as an ebook. The paperback and ebook differ in one story, a tale called 'The Broom Cupboard of Crossed Destinies', a collaboration I wrote with D.F. Lewis back in 1996. It's a story that uses pictures of Tarot Cards as essential to an understanding of the text, and the challenge of formatting these images for an ebook proved too much for me. In the ebook edition I have replaced this tale with an alternative.

Talking about D.F. Lewis, that gentleman has just completed one of his 'real time' reviews of this collection and I am delighted to report that his final judgment is, "I assess that this book could well be this author’s greatest book. Well, my own jury is out, sitting in the February gloom of my garden, like a secret guild, beyond my earshot. The book certainly is highly representative of his best work as well as his rare worst. And as a tribute to Italo Calvino, fans of that writer will, I am sure, appreciate this book greatly. Yet, even here, Rhys Hughes stands distinct as the strangest and uniquest writer I know. And Calvino would not have had it any other way, I guess."