...so, new today at 3:AM, Patrick Pujolas offers one such fiction in “The Slippermen”: www.3ammagazine.com/3am/the-slip...

I love short fictions of sinister surrealism, shot through with Lynchian dream logic: a narrator awakes in disorientating environment, feels tasked with an obscure purpose, encounters unlikely forms of resistance, and struggles towards an outcome that isn’t exactly a conclusion...

Slugs, babies, gibbons, God: Meghan Proulx's "Agnostic" is new today at 3:AM, densely packed (at 500 words) but with a gentle associative drift. www.3ammagazine.com/3am/agnostic/

Max made his début at 3:AM back in 2024, with ‘here is how to up and vanish’ — also a stunner, in case there’s any doubt that he’s the real deal: www.3ammagazine.com/3am/here-is-....

New short fiction at 3:AM Magazine kicked off again this week with a gem from Max Steiner, ‘One Good Look Is What You’re Worth’: www.3ammagazine.com/3am/one-good.... Dark nostalgia (is that a thing?) and kind of a run-on voice that pulls against the wordlessness of the kid at the centre of the piece

The cover of the One City anthology, with fiction by Alexander McCall Smith, Ian Rankin, and Irvine Welsh.

Irvine Welsh’s story is about a tiger on the loose in Murrayfield, with confusion among staff at the zoo. So, as I said, not an authentic escape, but a fictional one appropriately researched!

The caller is evasive. Says he maybe saw a tiger outside the zoo. How would we know if we were missing a tiger? So we have to get staff to do a check. We tell him the process as we go through parts of the policy. The call takes about 45 minutes to end. Then, a few months later, this book appears…

This was maybe mid-2005. I was working the reception desk. Very quiet afternoon. The phone rings; a gentleman wants to know what happens if a tiger escapes from the zoo. What’s the official protocol? Slight panic among the reception staff. Has a tiger been sighted on the loose? Do we do a lockdown?

Love this thread. I used to work at the zoo and had actually heard tell of the wallaby when I was there, but none of the others. During my time there, we had one reported incident of a chimp possibly breaking out, and then one other escape-related oddity at a slight tangent to genuine escapes…

Bristol Vaudrin and Daniel Davis Wood | Beyond The Zero Podcast Get more from Beyond The Zero Podcast on Patreon

Thanks, @beyondthezero.bsky.social, for having @danieldaviswood.bsky.social and I on to talk about past and future favorites.

Loved this chat @beyondzero.bsky.social, in particular @danieldaviswood.bsky.social’s top 5 (Heti/Pawson/Lutz/Biles/N Turner if you want a shortcut!)

On Nicholas Turner: “NOBODY else could have written the sentences in this book…his similes are out-of-this-world”

www.patreon.com/posts/bristo...

Always a pleasure to chat to Ben, and especially about that book!

Good thread on that thing everyone’s raging about

Better that, I suppose, than the kind of tepid response I found in myself. It’s disappointing that Everett seems to have broken through as his work has grown weaker.

The Response To Art Is Everything After reading a large paragraph in Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s short introduction to Sense and Nonsense, I took a hampered but hopeful breath and eyed the generous white space of the Northwestern Universi...

Also a new essay in Liberties: “‘His life was the projection of his future work,’ Merleau-Ponty says of Cézanne. Today, to claim such a mantle, even only as an aspiration, is to be scorned… Is the contemporary disdain for artists a product of proximity to them?” libertiesjournal.com/online-artic...

Souls of Grit A Conversation with Greg Gerke

“The world betrays everyone—the key is how we react to that. ... We fight our temperaments for decades and maybe we don’t let go until it’s in our interest, but what if our interests become passionless?” — @greggerkesocrates.bsky.social in Q&A Mark de Silva: markdesilva.substack.com/p/souls-of-g...

Orbital by Samantha Harvey & James by Percival Everett: — Open Letters Review Critic Tom LeClair reflects on two major prize-noticed new novels

For a dissenting view of Everett's James (as well as a positive notice of Harvey's Orbital), see Tom LeClair's piece in Open Letters Review: openlettersreview.com/posts/orbita...

As a judgment of the novel, this feels right to me. But as an attempt to guess Everett’s unvoiced intentions? It might be couched in diminutive terms (it’s not a review, it’s a notice, “my two cents,” etc.) but they’re not enough to downplay an incendiary allegation.

Love her work. So gloriously fucked up.

A page of text reading: “How delicious it would be roasted, the sailors cried, but the captain stopped them: a zoo in Berlin or Moscow would buy the octopus and they would all be rich. In the 200, it would wear a bowtie and make love to women pretending to be mermaids, the captain told his crew, redirecting their appetites. They made eel stew for dinner, and put the octopus in a bucket filled with water, with a lid on top.”

Camilla Grudova, ladies and gentlemen:

The River Tweed, looking west, with snowfall on the banks.

First snow alongside the Tweed.

That’s true; you’ve been fighting the good fight for this one for a long time. Worth it, too!

This is what did it for me. Twitter is where links go to die.

I’m trying to write something about it. Pulled some favourite passages into a Word doc to quote them. Only the very best, the ones that really floored me. But those alone run to almost 5,000 words, which says a lot about the intensity of this book. And so I’ve got a lot of narrowing-down to do…

"Fancy," probably. It's hilarious and kind of jaw-dropping in the way it sustains the conceit for a couple hundred pages. But "The Knack of Doing" is also ace; it's a story collection and there are three or four really first-rate pieces of fiction in there.

Jealous! A fantastic editor and an amazing writer in his own right.

"Daybook" by @nateknapp.bsky.social. Incantatory. More here: www.thisissplice.co.uk/fiction/dayb...

@addisonzeller.bsky.social is another of this year's return contributors. 'Barb City Manor' is a longer take on the form he debuted with, in three flash pieces, last year: a story that announces a direction and moves forward... but ends up off the map: danieldaviswood.substack.com/p/3am-fictio...

I'd be interested to hear about the best book you read during 2024 that you have not seen widely reviewed or praised, that has gone under the radar. A work that deserves more attention.

Newspapers and mags have their end of year round ups coming out and they rarely surprise.

Please surprise me.

Time for a tour de force: Sam Glover's 'On my heels'. This is the second time I've published Sam at 3:AM, so I'm doubly assured that he's one of the best -- strangest, boldest -- writers of short fiction in the UK today: danieldaviswood.substack.com/p/3am-magazi...