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
