Link Arms with Toads!
No longer available.
Link Arms with Toads!
by Rhys Hughes
Publication Date: 18th May, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-907681-08-0
Paperback, 286 pages
Self-reflective mirrors looking for their own reflections. Towns that migrate to the moon. Prisoners of elaborate dungeons and gigantic miniature solar systems. Robots, ghosts, rascals, explorers, troubadours, apemen and yetis. All are present in the multiverse of inversion and invention that is Link Arms with Toads!
Rhys Hughes is a unique figure in contemporary fiction whose speculative whimsicality is not so much balanced as trampolined by tensile prose and puckish pensiveness. Link Arms with Toads! forms the ideal introduction to his work.
Contents
1 The Troubadours of Perception
2 Number 13½
3 The Taste of the Moon
4 Lunarhampton
5 The Expanding Woman
6 All Shapes Are Cretans
7 The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart
8 Pity the Pendulum
9 333 and a Third
10 The Candid Slyness of Scurrility Forepaws
11 Ye Olde Resignation
12 Castle Cesare
13 The Mirror in the Looking Glass
14 Oh Ho!
15 Loneliness
16 Hell Toupée
17 Inside the Outline
18 Discrepancy
About The Author
Rhys Hughes was born in 1966 in Cardiff but grew up in the seaside town of Porthcawl. He began writing at an early age but his first publications were chess problems and mathematical puzzles for newspapers. He sold his first short story in 1992 and his first book, Worming the Harpy, was published in 1995. Since then he has embarked on a mammoth project of writing exactly 1000 linked ‘items’ of fiction, including novels, to form a gigantic story cycle. Many of these ‘items’ have appeared in journals and anthologies around the world, and his books have been translated into Spanish, French, Greek, Portuguese, Russian and Serbian. His work has attracted attention for its originality of ideas, ingenuity of plotting and rich playfulness of his language.
What People Say
“Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature… As well as being drunk on language and wild imagery, he is also sober on the essentials of thought. He has something of Mervyn Peake’s glorious invention, something of John Cowper Powys’s contemplative, almost disdainful existentialism, a sensuality, a relish, an addiction to the delicious. He’s as tricky as his own characters… He toys with convention. He makes the metaphysical political, the personal incredible and the comic hints at subtle pain. 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
“Hughes’ world is a magical one, and his language is the most magical thing of all.”
T.E.D. KLEIN
“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.”
JEFF VANDERMEER
Online Reviews