Stories From a Lost Anthology

Italo Calvino once said that he dreamed of writing the kind of stories that, lost to the world for an unknown number of years, are found in the attic of an abandoned house. Rhys Hughes, poking around in the same roof-space, has beaten him to it. As a result, we are proud to present a selection of the best stories from Hughes’s fortuitous find. We believe that they are suffused with the particular flavour of atticness after which Calvino yearned. Stories From a Lost Anthology is a new collection of tales (although, of course, they’ve been mouldering in that attic for an unspecified period) by Rhys Hughes, an acknowledged master of the short story. Fantastic, clever, funny, Hughes’s plotting and puns are frequently outrageous, but somehow, through a strong but warped internal logic, all is made probable, even believable. Many of the stories are set in the author’s native Wales, although they may not describe that country as the official guidebooks would have it. Have you ever wondered what happens in the rooms above a Welsh public house? Or to a vampire when it’s polarity is reversed? And how exactly would you kidnap Dylan Thomas, a half-century after his death? As Michael Moorcock says of Rhys Hughes in his Introduction to this collection, “Few living fictioneers approach this chef’s sardonic confections, certainly not in English. . . . His easy, Welsh harping will, I promise, stay with you, infectious, charming, oddly persuasive. Be warned: His images will inform your dreams.”