Trivialities

Trivialities (2025)
Gibbon Moon Books 

Daniil Kharms (1905-1942) was a Russian absurdist writer, a dissident and satirist who was imprisoned by the regime during the Second World War and died of starvation in a prison cell in Leningrad. His works were rescued from oblivion by friends and clandestinely preserved for several decades before the cultural climate in the Soviet Union loosened sufficiently to permit piecemeal publication. He is now renowned for a sequence of very brief stories, typically violent, acerbic, nightmarish yet comical snapshots of an oppressive reality in which truth and dream are seamlessly blended.

Trivialities is a tribute to Kharms. Here are eighty flash fictions that attempt to express admiration for the modes, themes and ironies of Kharms' microfictions. The nightmare endures as people are thrown out of windows, crushed by trams, flown into the sides of mountains, launched from catapults, bisected by guillotines, sealed alive in coffins. And often but not always they are resurrected in otrder to be destroyed by some other method. Meanwhile, Daniil Kharms himself waits for the sentence of starvation to be carried out in full, doing his best in secret to delay the process.

Trumpet Face

Trumpet Face (2025)

Incunabula Press

A comedic fantasy novel full of strange characters and stranger incidents.

"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."

With an Introduction by Michael Moorcock.

Tangents

Tangents (2025)

Raphus Press

The culmination of the Pandora's Bluff story cycle, which took 33 years in total to complete. Tangents is a mosaic work consisting of exactly one hundred linked flash fictions. The last of these fictions is a prequel to the first story in the cycle.

"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."