Tuesday, September 30, 2025
Trivialities
I first discovered the work of Kharms about fifteen or sixteen years ago. I grabbed a copy of the volume Incidences off the library shelf on impulse. It turned out to be an incredible book of ultra-short stories, dramatic shards and weird non-fiction pieces, pure Absurdism without any mitigating factors, individual prose fragments that make no sense on their own but when are regarded together with others of their kind seem to possess a certain profundity. Or rather, they echo and amplify each other (and sometimes distort or undermine each other too) to a point that is both beyond sense and yet somehow perfectly inevitable (and thus almost logical).
Writing in the 1920s and 1930s, Kharms seemed to anticipate the use of postmodernist fragmentation while simultaneously looking back at the grand tradition of Russian writing. His work often feels like a deeply odd hybrid between Kafka and Barthelme. His recurring themes achieve an awful, hilarious resonance as the book progresses... Old women falling out of windows, bricks falling on the heads of pedestrians, random accidents, disintegrating men...
My own modest offering, Trivialities, is a genuine homage to the author, a manifestation of my admiration in fictive terms for the offbeat speculations and fantastical tragicomedies of Kharms' microfictions.
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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