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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?

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...."