Monday, January 31, 2022

 

Get a Room!


My new poetry book has just been published. It's a collection I am very happy with because it has a satisfying unity. The official description says it all: "A slim book of poems about the thwarted passions of implausible and even impossible lovers who nonetheless manage to get it together thanks to some timely and snappy advice. Star-crossed, moon-spangled, kiss-splattered romantics should rejoice!"

This is one of the three new poetry collections I recently decided to put together. The other two are called Big Baboons and Sorry I'm Late, Sir: Barnacles! and I will be submitting them to publishers soon. Get a Room! has been published by Gibbon Moon Books and there will be a total of ten of my books from this imprint. At least that's the idea and my hope...

One of those books will be a massive collection of my more fabular stories called My Big Glib Book of Flippant Fairy Tales and I am really looking forward to seeing that one in print.

In the meantime Get a Room! is available in both paperback and email editions from Amazon and elsewhere.

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 6:08 AM 0 Comments

Saturday, January 22, 2022

 

Mathematical Ghost Stories


My first book of 2022 is a slim collection of five OuLiPo ghost stories that I wrote in the 1990s. One of them was published in the journal Ghosts and Scholars but I can't remember if any of the others were published. But I do know that they are being published all together for the first time now.

OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Litterature Pontentielle) is a perennial workshop of experimental fiction that was founded by Raymond Queneau and Francois le Lionnais in 1960. Its members attempt to create original fictions using mathematical and logical constraints that are arbitrary but rigorously applied.

Some OuLiPo constraints are complicated, some are simple. For these ghost stories a simple constraint has been chosen. Five of M.R. James’ stories (the more obscure ones) have been taken and sequels written for them. Each sequel is exactly the same length as the original and has an identical structure, which means it has the same number of paragraphs, the same number of sentences in each paragraph, the same number of words in every sentence, and all the punctuation marks are in exactly the same places.

The book is available on all Amazon outlets in both paperback and ebook editions.

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 6:36 AM 0 Comments

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