This compilation of short prose represents 'volume one' of a projected two-volume compilation which goes half-way towards a 'collected short prose' in that its contents derive from four different volumes dating from 1976-1981, and kind of fit together both stylistically and thematically, coming to an aphoristic head, which summarizes many of the subjects tackled, and in large part explains the author's choice of overall title, insofar as these aphorisms can be regarded as constituting the heads side of a 'coin' whose tails, as fiction to truth, can only be short prose. Although the first two pieces in this collection aren't strictly prose fiction, being if anything closer to short plays, we have included them with the prose-proper, if only because we see no future for them in theatre and don't really feel that they ought to stand alone or, for that matter, be excluded from other 'early' material with which they were originally written back in 1976, when John O'Loughlin tentatively set-out on a fictional journey destined to lead to and indeed culminate in philosophical truth, a tiny taste of which is provided by the aphoristic appendix; although the volume as a whole stops well-short of the sort of ideological earnestness that was to characterize his fiction from 1982 onwards and remains, despite the vigorous polemic, a tribute to ideological innocence.