Wednesday 12 July 2017

Salty Kiss Island

Salty Kiss Island (2017)
Immanion Press

"This anthology collects for the first time Rhys Hughes’ fantastical love stories. What is a fantastical love story? It isn’t quite the same as an ordinary love story. The events that take place are stranger, more extreme, full of the passion of originality, invention and magic, as well as an intensification of emotional love. Also, the voice that tells them has rather a different tone to a conventional romantic narrator. The stories in Salty Kiss Island are set in this world and others, spanning the spectrum of possible and impossible experiences, the uncharted territories of yearning, the depths and shoals of the heart, mind and soul. They are adventure yarns, whimsies and comedies, tragedies and paradoxes. They are melancholy, gleeful, philosophic or mystical. A love of language runs through them, parallel to the love that motivates their characters to feats of preposterous heroism, luminous lunacy and grandiose gesture. They include tales of minstrels and their catastrophic serenades, dreamers sinking into sequences of ever-deeper dreams, goddesses and mermaids, sailors and devils, messages in bottles that can think and speak but never be read, shadows with an independent life and voyagers of distant galaxies who are already at their destinations before they arrive."

Contents:

Foreword * All for Nothing * Accordion Beach * The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart * Paradise Discarded * Eternal Horizon * Starlight Girl * The Cargo Cults of Salty Kiss Island * The Sweetheart Rosary * Venus and Stupid * The Mermaid Variations * Message to Rosita * Left on the Shelf * The Cure of the Scandal in Averroës * Love Keys * The Requirements of Desire * The Sublime Voyage of Ariana Aragão * Died For Puns * As I Walked Out One Midsummer Night's Dream * Don Entrerrosca * A Spaceship in the Shape of a Woman * An Unpleasant Romance * What the Shadow Sees * Afterword

Cloud Farming in Wales

Cloud Farming in Wales (2017)
Snuggly Books

"In Wales it never stops raining. Or almost never. When it does stop raining from the sky, it rains from hearts instead. Indoors as well as outdoors, the people huddle in the endless drenchings, and over time they have evolved into aquatic creatures who only look and behave like men and women but aren’t really. There is a clue in the name of the country. Wales is a nation with no spot of dry land within its borders. Wales is an Atlantis that never stayed under but is just as wet. Crammed with mythical beings and happenings, Cloud Farming in Wales palpitates, germinates and extrapolates, but never evaporates, and the sodden heroes that wade and slosh through the mighty puddles of its pages are generally in search of a canoe."