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My name is Perceval Pitthelm and if it sounds familiar then you must be a devotee of adventure stories, for I’m a writer of them and successful in a modest way, but rather less popular than in my youth.
Writer, explorer, inventor, fantastist … join Perceval Pitthelm as he takes you on a journey in the township of Kionga, self-propelled on a pair of massive, mechanical kangaroo legs. His stories may be wild, but his adventures are even wilder.
In a riot of imagination and literary sleight of hand, Rhys Hughes presents an old-style adventure set in East Africa, Brazil and the Sahara Desert. We’re talking Philip José Farmer crossed with H Bedford-Jones meeting James Hilton by way of Karel Čapek (in his War with the Newts phase). And with hefty chunks of Flann O’Brien and Boris Vian thrown in for good measure!
‘Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature … Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English.’ — MICHAEL MOORCOCK“Quirky and fantastic and sometimes quite twisted, Rhys Hughes is a treat for those in the mood for something utterly different.” — ELLEN DATLOW
“Rhys Hughes is an accomplished player with words, plots, effects, relationships, sensibilities; you name it, Hughes tries to stand it on its head. More often than seems attributable to mere chance, he succeeds.” — ED BRYANT, LOCUS
“Dazzling prose. Put your feet up and dip in. Life will never seem quite the same again.” — THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE
“I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement.” — MICHAEL BISHOP
“The incredible richness of language, the inexhaustible array of puns, double entendres, weird metaphors, non-lexical use of words, and original turns of phrase… Rhys Hughes is essentially an absurdist humorist, though often of a peculiarly black, tricky, and sometimes bloody sort. Much of his work is travesty, drawing for substance on other works, which he uses as a basis for destructive humor, for reinterpretation in a different mode, or as a starting point for his own work. This statement is not meant in disparagement, for Hughes’s new versions are highly original in conception and often brilliant.” — SUPERNATURAL FICTION WRITERS (SCRIBNERS)
“Hughes’ world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all.” — T E D KLEIN
“There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes’ fiction; it’s so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered.” — JEFFREY FORD
“Hughes’ similarity to Spike Milligan runs deeper than the occasional shared lurch of phrase, for he writes as though he’d been bloodied in the same wars Milligan fought for eight decades: the same up-yours melancholia about the malice of the absurd – about the absurdness of the world defined not only as an inherent lack of species-friendly grammar in the convulsion of the real, but also a sense that anyone who acts as though he believes what he is told by our Masters will almost necessarily inflict pain on others.” — JOHN CLUTE
“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.
Genre: Fantasy
Writer, explorer, inventor, fantastist … join Perceval Pitthelm as he takes you on a journey in the township of Kionga, self-propelled on a pair of massive, mechanical kangaroo legs. His stories may be wild, but his adventures are even wilder.
In a riot of imagination and literary sleight of hand, Rhys Hughes presents an old-style adventure set in East Africa, Brazil and the Sahara Desert. We’re talking Philip José Farmer crossed with H Bedford-Jones meeting James Hilton by way of Karel Čapek (in his War with the Newts phase). And with hefty chunks of Flann O’Brien and Boris Vian thrown in for good measure!
‘Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature … Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English.’ — MICHAEL MOORCOCK“Quirky and fantastic and sometimes quite twisted, Rhys Hughes is a treat for those in the mood for something utterly different.” — ELLEN DATLOW
“Rhys Hughes is an accomplished player with words, plots, effects, relationships, sensibilities; you name it, Hughes tries to stand it on its head. More often than seems attributable to mere chance, he succeeds.” — ED BRYANT, LOCUS
“Dazzling prose. Put your feet up and dip in. Life will never seem quite the same again.” — THE THIRD ALTERNATIVE
“I wore throughout the undisplaceable, unsequelchable rictus of a grin of both delight and amazement.” — MICHAEL BISHOP
“The incredible richness of language, the inexhaustible array of puns, double entendres, weird metaphors, non-lexical use of words, and original turns of phrase… Rhys Hughes is essentially an absurdist humorist, though often of a peculiarly black, tricky, and sometimes bloody sort. Much of his work is travesty, drawing for substance on other works, which he uses as a basis for destructive humor, for reinterpretation in a different mode, or as a starting point for his own work. This statement is not meant in disparagement, for Hughes’s new versions are highly original in conception and often brilliant.” — SUPERNATURAL FICTION WRITERS (SCRIBNERS)
“Hughes’ world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all.” — T E D KLEIN
“There are no easy phrases to describe Hughes’ fiction; it’s so exotic. His writing is incredibly precise and at the same time his imagination is so unfettered.” — JEFFREY FORD
“Hughes’ similarity to Spike Milligan runs deeper than the occasional shared lurch of phrase, for he writes as though he’d been bloodied in the same wars Milligan fought for eight decades: the same up-yours melancholia about the malice of the absurd – about the absurdness of the world defined not only as an inherent lack of species-friendly grammar in the convulsion of the real, but also a sense that anyone who acts as though he believes what he is told by our Masters will almost necessarily inflict pain on others.” — JOHN CLUTE
“It’s a crime that Rhys Hughes is not as widely known as Italo Calvino and other writers of that stature. Brilliantly written and conceived, Hughes’ fiction has few parallels anywhere in the world. In some alternate universe with a better sense of justice, his work triumphantly parades across all bestseller lists.
Genre: Fantasy
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