Wednesday, September 24, 2025
Another Free Ebook
It's my birthday. Birthdays are times when presents are given. Therefore I have made the ebook edition of my most recent book free for the next three days. That's the present.
This book is a collection of linked short stories themed around Egypt, ancient, modern and offbeat. It was published a few weeks ago by Eibonvale Press as a hardback and this ebook has been issued thanks to an arrangement with the publisher.
Wednesday, September 17, 2025
Free Ebook
Robots in Love is a free ebook for the next three days. This is the link to Amazon US but it can be found on any Amazon platform. The ebook has been published by Gibbon Moon Books in association with Eibonvale Press. The hardback edition has been available for a couple of weeks already. The paperback will follow fairly soon. Here is a link to the ebook edition:
** ROBOTS IN LOVE **
As I have said elsewhere, this novella is one of my very few stories set in outer space. I had the idea many years ago for a retelling of Longus' Daphnis and Chloe set in the future in a distant solar system. I am very pleased with the final result.
Sunday, September 14, 2025
Trumpet Face
With an Introduction by Michael Moorcock, Trumpet Face is the first of the three to be written and the first to be published. Influenced by Ronald Firbank, Nathanael West, Boris Vian, Flann O'Brien, Donald Barthelme, and Moorcock himself, it is a light absurdist adventure, a surreal comedy, an experiment with lateral thinking, and a fictive application of the alternative logics of wordplay and ideas association.
The book is available as a paperback from Incanubula Press and will soon be available as an ebook from Gibbon Moon Books. The publisher's back cover description of the novel runs as follows:
"The explorer who can turn his head into a trumpet if he tries really hard has crashed his balloon again, an accident that leads to him becoming the guest of a very strange household. He is introduced to the members of the tribe, including a living suit of armour, levitating skull, sentient reflection, and the woman or women in a state of quantum superposition he is fated to fall in love with.
In a world ruled by the flux of wordplay and ideas-association rather than ordinary cause and effect, he must adapt quickly to the demands of lateral logic or perish. He must learn to blow impossible fanfares with his own face to secure his future."
Saturday, September 13, 2025
Tangents
Tangents is a mosaic work consisting of exactly one hundred little fictions. The last of these fictions is a prequel to my oldest existing story, which dates from 1989 and was the first story in my cycle of one thousand texts. Tangents was supposed to be the last story I ever wrote, but it didn't work out that way.
Published in Brazil by Raphus Press in a limited edition, Tangents will soon also be available in low cost paperback and ebook editions. The publisher's description of the book runs in part as follows:
"In the brief narratives of this new work, Hughes's obsessions, humour, unique perceptions, and subversions of language come to the forefront. Tangents is yet another essential contribution from an author who is as significant as he is unconventional.
This book has a perfect square format (7.87 × 7.87 in.), 90 pages, with an exclusive, painfully handcrafted Japanese binding style. As usual, this new chapbook edition will be very scarce: only 30 copies, plus some (very few) private copies."
I will post information about the paperback and ebook editions here on my blog once the limited edition has sold out.
Thursday, September 04, 2025
That Other Egypt
This book took a long time to come together. I never intended to write a linked series of fictions themed on Egypt. It just happened. The earliest story in this collection dates from 1994, the second earliest from 2016: a considerable gap. The others followed in piecemeal fashion. The project was completed last year. Ten stories in total, though one is actually a play.
There is more than one Egypt.
There is the Egypt of reality and dreams, a realm of impossible nostalgia, a sandblown land cut by the mightiest of rivers, ancient and enigmatic, the days swirling with the dust of millennia, the nights thick with the accumulated echoes of countless generations, alluring, exotic, often arcane, a focus of desire for generations of archaeologists.
But parallel Egypts exist too, more sinister and even more mysterious, where pyramids are inverted and every object that can be mummified will be. Some of these alternative Egypts might be found inside our heads, others will transform those heads into geometrical travesties of themselves.
Egypt is a multiplicity, an infinite layering of secrets.
The strong cohesion of the finished book came as a surprise to me. It's another excellently designed volume from Eibonvale Press and I am as delighted as always with the creations of this publisher. Their books have a unique look and the hardbacks are beautifully produced.
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