<DIV></DIV> <p>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 café in “Ad Vivum”) to the bittersweet (a drifter marking time between busses in “Ante Meridiem”); the intimate (an altar boy's 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.</P>