Salty Kiss Island

This volume 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.

Foreword by the Author

All for Nothing

Accordion Beach

The Innumerable Chambers of the Heart

Paradise Discarded

Eternal Horizon

Starlight Girl

The Cargo Cult 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 by the Author