On the composition of songs and of elements, and on the decomposition of relationships.

This week Hannah sets the interplay of flattering lies, inapplicable truths and incongruous seductions to the 12-count rhythm of the Flamenco Bolero--music of doomed love and del Amor Brujo. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

"What isn’t entertaining in the least, however, is the ever increasing number of people who come to my beauty parlor in order to die...."

What is beauty? How do we experience it, what other (darker) elements does it enfold within itself, and what functions does it serve in human life?

Do face masks really make you more beautiful? This week Casey and Hannah consider all these important questions as they talk about two notions of beauty cherished by two characters forced to navigate catastrophe.

Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

Hannah gets drunk on moonshine and Casey pretends to know something about classical music. Get ready for a night at the symphony! Don your best mink stole, chug down that glass of champagne because you can't bring it in with you, take a a seat, --for God's sake stop coughing!--open up your glossy program, and prepare to learn everything you need to know about the sordid family sagas of the musically ingenious. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent sonata?

Pour yourself a nice big glass of sweet tea, have a seat on the porch swing, and watch the neighbors (and if you're lucky, the local law enforcement) embarrass themselves right there in the middle of the magnolia-lined street. This episode, Hannah reads, in a most charming southern accent, two tales of scandal, shame, and public ignominy in the Old South. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

"It was then that I decided to organize my first really chaotic party..."

Parties do lots of things in literature. They offer feasts for the senses. They suspend the rules governing everyday life. The lavish balls, weddings, soirees, fetes and banquets of literary classics like Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby are both events and pretexts for more events: challenging a rival, attracting a lover, revealing a secret, or playing cruel pranks on unsuspecting guests.

In the thick of planning her own extravagant wedding party, Casey reads, with some attempts at regional accents, two tales of lavish and unusual Parties. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent story?

Oscillating between the World of IF and the World if IS, this week Hannah brings us two tales in the key of Psych Fi.

Which one do YOU think is the Non-existent Story?

Valerian, Hare’s ear, Sow Thistle, Tsar's Eyes, Round-Leaved Sundew, Basil, Elecampane...

Casey tells us how to cure jealousy, spot a heretic, rise to great glory, and of terrible bats invented by the natives to raise the price of cinnamon.

Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

Hannah launches our second season of story-making and story-stealing with two contemporary reflections on the capricious transformations and divine condemnations of Ovid's Metamorphoses. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

In the C entries of his Dictionary of Accepted Ideas, Gustave Flaubert writes "Catholicism: had a good influence on art." Contradictory as always, Hannah brings us two parables that explore the crueler, darker, decidedly ungood side of great religious art: a painter who corrals blind man into a ditch over and over again to capture in detail their terror, and the sacrifice of a choir of aging castratti to Roman soldiers.

Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

The BEAT GENERATION "grew to independent mind on beachheads, in gin mills and U.S.O.'s, in past-midnight arrivals and pre-dawn departures. Their brothers, husbands, fathers or boy friends turned up dead one day at the other end of a telegram. At the four trembling corners of the world...they had intimate experience with the nadir and the zenith of human conduct, and little time for much that came between. Their own lust for freedom, and the ability to live at a pace that kills (to which the war had adjusted them), led to black markets, bebop, narcotics, sexual promiscuity, hucksterism, and Jean-Paul Sartre. The beatness set in later."

And yet what this New York Times journalist identified in 1952 as an aberrant and specifically post-World War II American craving for intensity continues to resonate among youth in this and in other trembling corners of the globe.

This week, Casey brings us two tales of persistent and perseverant Beatnik Fandom. Which one do YOU think is the Non-existent Story?