About This Book
This second volume of John O'Loughlin's Collected Short Prose dates from 1982-4 and differs from those prose pieces in the first volume, 'Two Sides of the Same Coin' (1976-81), only in the sense that some of the ones included here are, by and large, more ideologically conditioned, the ideological philosophy of Social Transcendentalism having begun to sprout from the soil of his fertile intellect around 1984, and therefore coinciding with a number of pieces appertaining to what was originally the author's seventh book of short prose which, frankly, comes right at the end of his commitment to the genre and therefore coincides with a marked rise in philosophical tempo, so to speak, in his writings as a whole. The title of this volume originates, in part, with the title to the previous one, insofar as the metaphorical coin is here alluded to with reference to fiction alone, if in a pun-like way which reinforces the concept of prose at the expense, unlike the first volume, of aphoristic philosophy. But by then the prose had become so philosophic that there was hardly need for an aphoristic appendix, the last piece in this volume taking prose to philosophical heights that rival if not surpass Nietzsche, whose Zarathustra is here eclipsed by 'the Social Transcendentalist'.
