*New mp3 preview tracks at CC Audio by John Celona, Lawrence Russell, Ottmar Liebert, Jon Gagan, Brother Paul, Paul Wainwright, Stephen Duros, Luciane Cardassi, Man Muso

Fast Fiction: read it off the screen or print it out... or have someone else read it and tell you about it later. Straight to the point but without revealing the full-deck, this cryptic collection of stories by Lawrence Russell is metaphysical and existential, symbolist and realist, more international than regional.

An oral cadence drives the action, loads the imagery. A tango dancer is a member of a death squad... a ventriloquist thinks he's a poet... a student finds a mysterious hole in the wall of his room... a financier encounters a snake in a tropical graveyard... a boy is abandoned beside an endless wall... an Austrian horse breeder and his young wife ride through Mexico in search of the ideal horse.... Etc.

"I never thought I'd write any more fiction for readers," says LR. "Like a lot of the literati, I have stories from years ago lost in those university magazines no one ever reads but whose illusory, subsidized reality supports the CVs of nearly all modern poets. Same thing with the theatre. I left both those scenes behind, went into audio drama. But I guess I got sentimental. Sometimes we have to read, and these days we do it off a screen."

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