A Perfect Holiday Gift: Engelbrecht Again from Dead Letter Press

Dead Letter Press has just released Rhys Hughes' volume Engelbrecht Again in a limited signed edition. It's a handsome volume of spry and sprightly tales that tell the continuing adventures of the world's most famous surrealist dwarf boxer. You can find more information here. Below I've posted part of my introduction to the volume. I really enjoyed these stories, and it makes for an unusual and elegant holiday gift. (Also check out DLP's Bound for Evil anthology.)MY ADDITIONAL MISADVENTURES WITH ENGELBRECHTMy first encounter with Engelbrecht the Dwarf Surrealist Boxer, in all of his eccentric glory, occurred when I received The Exploits of Engelbrecht, a lavishly illustrated tome from Savoy Books (designed by John Coulthart) purporting to be the work of one Maurice Richardson, the stories originally published in Lilliput Magazine. As I entertained myself with tales of dog opera, sports on Mars, witch shoot-outs, and plant theater, I soon came to realize that “Maurice Richardson” must be a portmanteau nom de plume for a garrulous and various collection of ne’er-do-wells and drunkards who had come up with the character of “Engelbrecht” in a bar and proceeded to do an Album Zutique project, as per the French Decadents several generations before. Certainly, this would explain the frequent references to the “Surrealist Sportsman’s Club,” no doubt a phantasmagorical version and vision of whatever worn and seedy pub had originally housed the miscreants responsible as they mapped out their insane adventures on napkins, tablecloths, and the labels of a multitude of wine bottles.(Original edition from Savoy)Such was the exoticism of the visions laid out before me. Single authorship seemed not only not credible, but incredible. Of course, this issue soon fell from my mind, erased by the originality and fleet-footedness of the collection...only to return when, upon finishing the last story, “Unquiet Wedding,” I realized that short of erasing my memory, I would never again freshly encounter Engelbrecht. Never again would I have those initial moments of innocent and not so innocent discovery.So imagine my delight when Dead Letter Press delivered to my door a manuscript by a mad Welshman, one Rhys Hughes, purporting to be Engelbrecht Again: Being the Further Adventures of Engelbrecht. Those multitudinous authorial phantoms concocting Engelbrechtian illusions whilst imbibing absinthe, nepenthe, and things much stranger, apparently had been hard at work in the intervening years—not just creating new tales, but also re-creating a new pen name; one more believable for being Welsh and for having already resurrected the obscure Argentinean dwarf/juggler Jorge Luis Borges in convincing fashion for A New Universal History of Infamy.With trembling hand and twitching eye (a familial tic familiar to my familiar), I perused the pages with a strange mixture of dread and anticipation. I longed to learn more of Engelbrecht’s exploits, but was this authorial collective named “Rhys Hughes” as talented or as lunatic as that previously labeled “Maurice Richardson”? Would the multi-brain multi-verse of “Hughes” read as if it came from lithe Lilliput or from its distorted mirror brother, the uncouth Blefuscudia?For the startling conclusion to this tale of growing dread disguised as an intro, buy Rhys Hughes' book...(Original stories in the latest Savoy edition)