Setting off to explore Wales and meeting the reincarnation of Dylan Thomas.
"It wasn’t my idea to kidnap Dylan Thomas and hold the poet for ransom in a garage. My wife physically forced me into it. That’s not true. We were drunk at the time, on a very murky beer. I wanted nothing to do with the project, deeming it squalid and impractical, but Rhiannon is persuasive. Not that her words are smooth: she’s all edges and stubble when it comes to vocabulary. Also to chin. I often claim her banter is abrasive enough to sand a door, or scour a saucepan. Then I remember our kitchen and the unwashed pots crammed into cupboards which don’t shut properly. But even without such domestic applications, the thorny melody in her voice can’t be resisted. She’s a mesmerist. ‘Are you really serious?’ I hissed."
"Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature. 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
"If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes’ style, with all that means, is among the most beautiful I’ve encountered in several years.’ — SAMUEL R. DELANY
"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
Genre: Literary Fiction
"It wasn’t my idea to kidnap Dylan Thomas and hold the poet for ransom in a garage. My wife physically forced me into it. That’s not true. We were drunk at the time, on a very murky beer. I wanted nothing to do with the project, deeming it squalid and impractical, but Rhiannon is persuasive. Not that her words are smooth: she’s all edges and stubble when it comes to vocabulary. Also to chin. I often claim her banter is abrasive enough to sand a door, or scour a saucepan. Then I remember our kitchen and the unwashed pots crammed into cupboards which don’t shut properly. But even without such domestic applications, the thorny melody in her voice can’t be resisted. She’s a mesmerist. ‘Are you really serious?’ I hissed."
"Rhys Hughes seems almost the sum of our planet’s literature. 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
"If I said he was a Welsh writer who writes as though he has gone to school with the best writing from all over the world, I wonder if my compliment would just sound provincial. Hughes’ style, with all that means, is among the most beautiful I’ve encountered in several years.’ — SAMUEL R. DELANY
"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
Genre: Literary Fiction
Used availability for Rhys Hughes's The New Giraldus