After a fortnight of waiting for our next episode, what better than two absurd romps through worlds where people are waiting? Hannah's characters await the call on the red phone, the implementation of "Project Who, Me?", to get off or on the plane or out of the airport, for the power to come back on, for the delegates to stop beating senseless the Belgian who suggested passing the time with a spelling bee.

Two absurd (yet oddly plausible) tales of the moments, hours, days before the onslaught of total chaos and destruction: which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

Atlantis, so the story goes, was a vast civilization, wealthy, powerful and advanced, with colonies all over the world. Around the year 9560 B.C., there was a massive tsunami (possibly the inspiration for the Biblical story of the flood), and it was submerged under the waters of the Atlantic Ocean.

First mentioned by Plato in the Criticus and Timaeus (4th B.C.), in modern times the image of a submerged world--of a non-existent civilization-- has inspired many stories. Here are two of them. Which one do YOU think is the Non-Existent Story?

This week Hannah brings us back to the years before the Great War, and down streams of consciousness and unconsciousness, into a fluid dream world of porcelain bubbles and Spencerian verse and lost loves that return only to again melt or age or dissolve away into nothingness...

in a story where nothing exists as it once did, which one is the Non-Existent dream?

The Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard (1931-1989) is one of 20th century European literature's great voices of protest. His writing is characterized by hysterical (and hysterically funny) critiques of Austria and Austrians. But what would a Bernhard novel be like in a country that is nothing like Austria?

This week, Casey reads us excerpts from two American exercises in Bernhardism.

Which one do YOU think is the non-existent story?

A Victorian surgeon operates on a medium in the hopes of improving her supernatural powers. A mythical bull and warrior suddenly find themselves in the middle of an 1860s Montana snow storm.

This week Hannah brings us two tales of myths, monsters, and a man who collects memoirs about the devil. Which one do YOU think is the non-existent story?

"Leontis has been a ranch hand in Deer Lodge Valley, Montana for as long as he can remember. Finishing his daily rounds, he comes upon a half-naked man with a sword, suspiciously prodding a frozen corpse. Leontis instinctively draws his pistol. The man addresses him in an unknown tongue..."

Two lives no one would choose and no one seems to quite know how to end. With her incomparable black humor, Hannah tells us two stories of failed and frustrated suicide attempts--one in a New York accent!

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

Is the duel an expression of integrity and bravery, or of violence and stupidity? Is there such a thing as honor?

Back from Spain, Casey brings a fan, a pile of books, and two Spanish tales of honor defended to the death

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

Read or watch at nonexistentstory.com !

They are not ghost stories. They are Spiritist stories.

Casey shares two literary gems set in Madrid and inspired by this 19th-century synthesis of Science and Religion: one from Amalia Domingo Soler's Cuentos Espiritistas, and the other a non-existent looping tale of progress, sarsparilla, and the complications of subversive communication with the Spirit World:

"But neither Jotim nor Wallace is certain if spirits have names, if they are earthly names or spirit names, if it is blasphemous to evoke them, or if their names change, or for that matter if after bodily death the opinions and ideas of the spirits change once they return to a state of Spirithood, and so they fall to discussing whether or not animals have spirits, why Spirits must act secretly, why some children can communicate directly with spirits, and why do babies cry when they are born, and is rebellion part of the natural law, and finally if any man can detain the march of human progress, and here they desist, for both of them agree that the march of human progress is impossible to detain."

Casey reads us, in two breathless run-on sentences, summaries of the paridigmatic (Latin) American genre, the dictator novel.

"...To presume to communicate something to someone is to deprive them of their freedom, and this country stands for nothing if it does not stand for freedom!” whereupon the CMO took a swig of Riesling, and after a brief and perplexed pause we all clapped--the word freedom was always our cue to clap--and then the CMO continued explaining how the most important thing for anyone who works in marketing to know is that no one NEEDS your information, nothing you do is necessary or valuable to them in any way, and your job is to never let them suspect this fact even for a second...."

Two tales of murder, legal drama, affairs, betrayal, suicide and corruption--all against the desolate background of the American West. One of these stories is true, and the other very well could be. Hannah tells us about Joan Didion's "Some dreamers of the Golden Dream" and a 1978 miscarriage of justice in the courts of the Mormon Church:

"The four-year affair between Henry Mitchell and Matthias Slate is a predictable one, perhaps, to the non-orthodox mind. The falsified motel registrations, the lunch dates, the late church meetings that never seemed to reach the church bulletin. It is speculation to question how long Joan Slate new about it, and Henry Mitchell never said because the prosecution never got the chance to ask...."