Saturday, February 28, 2026

 

The Unfair Dinkum


The second book in the "Knick Knack Trilogy" has just been published. But it's not a conventional trilogy because the books can be read in any order. Maybe it's a triptych instead?

Each book has an Introduction by a renowned author. The first book had an Introduction by Michael Moorcock. The Unfair Dinkum has an Introduction by Brian Evenson. Brian has been a supporter of my work for several years and I regard him as a generous as well as talented fellow.

Whereas the first book was influenced by Ronald Firbank, Mervyn Peake, Nathanael West and Moorcock himself, this second book was most strongly inspired by Richard Brautigan.

Like the earlier book, The Unfair Dinkum is a light absurdist adventure, a speculative farce and a fictive experiment with lateral thinking. 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:

"Welcome to The Living Library, also known as the Flesh and Blood Lending Facility. Here people do not check out books, but actual writers. You check them out, take them home for a few weeks, and then bring them back. If the writer is dead, you check out a sack of his remains... Sounds reasonable, the sort of place anyone would want to work. And our narrator is fairly happy, until one day his routine is disrupted by Joey Rue, an Australian writer who has the impertinence to check himself out of the library and precipitate an adventure which takes him, and our narrator, across vast tracts of perilous land in search of the ‘Unfair Dinkum’. And what is that?  You need to read the book to find out, cobber."

To celebrate the publication of The Unfair Dinkum, the ebook edition of the first book in the series is a free download for the next five days. FREE here on Kindle until 4th March!

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 6:38 PM 0 Comments

Tuesday, February 17, 2026

 

Trumpet Strudel Mineshafts


TRUMPET STRUDEL MINESHAFTS, my second book of plays, has been published after a long delay. Eighteen short plays, absurdist comedies, rambunctious whimsies, speculative farces.

Featuring castaways, cowboys, duellists, pandas, pilots, twiddlers, cyclists, phantoms, eccentric academics, angry bears, jazz musicians, mystic gorillas, philosophers, hippies, madmen, and many more strange characters. Written for people and puppets, for dreamers and schemers, and intended for the page as well as the stage.

The book includes the first of my plays to ever be performed on stage ('The Modesty Men').

To celebrate the event, I have made the ebook FREE for the next five days. I have also made the ebook of my first book of plays, THE DANGEROUS STRANGENESS, free for five days, as a companionable action.

Here's the link to the older book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GN9DT934

And here's the link to the new book:
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GNMH9Y5Q

Those links are to Amazon US but the ebooks are available for free from any Amazon platform.

Both covers are by the artist Selwyn Rodda.

# posted by Rhys Hughes @ 10:04 AM 0 Comments

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