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. - A Centretruths editorial
John O'Loughlin is a London-based author who was born in the Republic of Ireland of an English mother of mixed Irish descent and grew up first in Hampshire and then in Surrey, in south-eastern England, where he attended a variety of state schools. Most of his adult life has been spent at different addresses in the London Borough of Haringey, north of the River Thames, to which he moved from Surrey in 1974, and all but a few of his books have been written there, the majority of which, like this one, are of an intensely philosophical not to say metaphysical and even ideological character.