Having already published short stories or, as John O'Loughlin (with his philosophical bias) prefers to call them, 'short prose' in two volumes of 'collected short prose', viz. Two Sides of the Same Coin & Tales Side Up, the former of which included, as per custom back then, an aphoristic appendix, this author decided to republish them in one volume (minus the aphorisms) for convenience's sake, in the interests, one might say, of structural and thematic continuity together with a certain prosy purism that sets definite bounds to the scope and style of the contents, dovetailed, as they are, into a somewhat voluminous but nonetheless highly accessible project whose material spans the period 1976–84, during which virtually all of his fictional writings, including several novels, or works of 'long prose', were composed. – A Centretruths editorial