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…

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

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.

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...

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.

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...

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...