Precis

Award-winning novelist, screenwriter and playwright Bill Mesce, Jr. turns, for the first time, to short fiction in a gallery of pieces ranging from the familiar (an encounter at a winter-whipped commuter bus stop in North) to the arcane (a lost cavalry patrol in the Civil War-set Precis); the sweet (a hopeful tete a tete at Parisian caf in Ad Vivum) to the bittersweet (a drifter marking time between busses in Ante Meridiem); the intimate (an altar boys private rebellion in Crusade) to the epic (the Vietnam War novella, Diamond Red. Mesce's stunning first collection of short fiction grafts sharp images onto a landscape filled with compelling characters, characters who laugh and love and ache. His stories carry and a sense of immediacy, the truth of experience.