Love can't be bottled but it might arrive in a bottle...Love is a game like chess but with smiles, winks, laughs and kisses for pieces...Love is a problem. Is there a solution? Cult author Rhys Hughes answers this question and resolves all the paradoxes in his new novelette. Join the woman who has no need for romance and the sailor from another age as they simultaneously attempt to accept and avoid the designs of destiny.

For more than two decades, Welsh writer Rhys Hughes has been entertaining and befuddling readers with his distinctive mix of terror, humor, fantasy, and absurdity. Although influenced by such writers as Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, his work is utterly unique in its melding of weirdness and comic grotesquerie.
In this substantial collection of new and reprinted stories, Hughes displays the literary skills that have brought him a wide and devoted readership. In "The Old House Under the Snow," we find two explorers burrowing under the snow to find a house whose bizarre features...

A collection of thirty stories inspired by the genius of the writer Italo Calvino... Paradoxical and philosophical fables; impossible cartographies and labyrinths of the mind and heart; towers that stretch across the universe; men who set sail on domestic oceans; the opinions and hopes of the sun; sentient geometries; games with gravity and planets; metafiction and wordplay; recursion and exploration; the perplexities of logic and desire. These thirty tribute stories demonstrate the whimsical inventiveness and originality of an author who has won considerable acclaim for his speculative...

The last in a long decadent line of piratical Spanish eccentrics, Bartleby Cadiz grows up in isolation to be as mad, bad and metaphysical as his ancestors. But he feels there is something different about him. What can it be? At last the doubloon drops. He is a lesbian trapped in a man's body This realization starts him off on a grotesque voyage of discovery full of ironic transformations, implausible insights and bizarre betrayals, as he quests for true love in a world where friendship is only a theory. But not until an arcane giraffe lures him to a disastrous alchemical redemption will the...

A collection of previously unpublished stories by a highly regarded writer of modern speculative fiction. The seashell contract is binding on the human race. Once it is signed, the ocean will grow warmer and storms rage across the land. Other tales involve the longest chopsticks, a man who falls afoul of the sons of the sea, the first selfie photograph ever taken and its unexpected consequences, the man who swallowed an apple pip in order to grow a tree in his stomach, and the sasquatch who went to work in an office... 22 stories in total and all for a good cause. The author's profits from...