Someone Else

In Someone Else award-winning essayist John Hughes pays homage to twenty one artists, writers and musicians who have had a formative influence on his imagination.

From Chekhov and Borges and Beckett, to Proust, Rothko and Cage – each essay brings its subject to life in unexpected ways. Kafka rewrites the parable of Abraham and Isaac, with no one to stay Abraham's knife. Wittgenstein considers the relationship between turtles and time. Bob Dylan stars in a fantasy of travellers and deserts and women with knives and silver earrings. Just around the corner from where Hughes works, Dostoyevsky fries kidneys in the kitchen of his Stanley Street terrace…

Like The Idea of Home, Someone Else uses the essay as a form of autobiography. Here, however, the essays are fictions. Or are they? Hughes tells the stories of the figures who live in his mind by making them tell his stories – and in doing so engages in an art of literary ventriloquism.