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These eighty-one stories were arbitrarily fashioned during a single year. Michelene Wandor, a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic, invited family members, friends - and some passing acquaintances - to give her four random words. These quartets signal each story as a kind of riddle: the solution in the title, the clues, Marple and Poirot-like, embedded in each brief narrative. Punning, witty, scholarly, off the wall, each with its unique punchline, the pieces go beyond flash fiction and poetry, into freed association, with unpredicted and unpredictable motifs. The language becomes and is becoming: transformative and serendipitous in the writing and the reading. Michelene Wandor is a playwright, poet, fiction writer and cultural critic. She has taught creative writing for more than three decades, currently as tutor for the MA at Lancaster University.

These two fables by poet-editor-translator Anthony Rudolf explore richly detailed imaginary landscapes situated far from each other in time and space.Pedraterra: 'As in every country, there are intelligent people and stupid people, good people and bad people, susceptible people and potentially rebellious people. Not all have been brainwashed and some never will be. However, a serious rebellion will be quashed unmercifully. You, a democrat, a sweetheart, a child at heart, a man of gifts, are the most benign version of the stone-touched human imaginable, but you are straitjacketed.'Angleterre: 'The precocious Racine explained to Antoine that he had been writing poetry - in French and in Latin - for about a year but that his way of seeing the world could no longer be contained in poetry and cried out for the broader canvas of a play. If he did eventually write a play, he for one would naturally obey the proprieties.'

'I have now given shape, though clumsily-so clumsily that, in the past, I would not have divulged them like this-to these pages begun immediately after the 21st of April, 2001, and dragged around like a burden for three years, the burden of an unsatisfactory draft, of an unfulfilled promise. Now published, despite everything, because of the impulse of friendship that they originally signified; and because of what they wanted to say and say again, before I will assuredly no longer be able to do so.'-Philippe JaccottetPhilippe Jaccottet is the prize-winning, Swiss-born French poet who, in 2014, became only the third poet (after René Char and St. John Perse) to enter Gallimard's Pléiade list while still living and working. "Truinas, April 21, 2001" is Jaccottet's meditation on his long friendship with another essential French poet, André du Bouchet (1924-2001), provoked by Du Bouchet's funeral - 'an event that evokes memories of their first meeting a half-century earlier, their literary affinities (notably their common literary admiration for the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin), the particularly vivid perceptions of the natural surroundings of Du Bouchet's house in the south of France, and, not least, the doubts-scruples-about the very possibility of writing truly and honestly about death.' - John Taylor