Cirrus@Austlit

Dedication: Lovingly dedicated to my father James Spratt Russell

Author's note: I began writing this book in Brooklyn, September 1999. Since then, terrorists have killed a lot of people and destroyed the World Trade Center. Why persist with fiction under these circumstances? My Manhattan is an overcrowded third-world island off the east coast of North America. It's a place some people dreamed up a long while ago, and then it got out of hand. The events depicted here are examples of what happens when the imagination is overheated. Henry Miller knew that better than anyone. I kept the following quote (from Tropic of Cancer) in front of me while I reworked what began in my imagination during that millennium-year sabbatical with my family. 'If now and then we encounter pages that explode, that wound and sear, that writing groans and tears and curses, know they come from a man with his back up, a man with nothing left but his words'. Bruce L. Russell Fremantle, September 2003.