I’m a novelist, essayist, editor, and publisher, originally from coastal Australia and now based in the hills outside Edinburgh. I’ve got a number of books to my name, and lots of essays in a range of venues; all the details are below. Among other things, I also run a small press and edit fiction for a magazine. Read more.
My fiction is represented by the Shaw Literary Agency. All my reviews, essays, and occasional writings are now available on Substack.
Other than popping up occasionally on BlueSky, I’m not active on social media. The best way to contact me is via the form at the bottom of this page.
Recent work
This is the demo text.
Splice is a small press I founded in 2017 to publish adventurous, unconventional literary fiction and essays. Click here to read more.
I’ve been the Fiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine since 2023, publishing the prose work of around thirty writers per year. Read more.
For the past several years I’ve been learning Norwegian. While visiting Norway in summer 2026, I decided to try my hand at translation and picked up a few Norwegian books that haven’t appeared in English yet. I’m publishing the results of my efforts here, as an exercise in running an open-source project. You’ll find my English text below, with annotations that show the original Norwegian, sometimes accompanied by a literal word-for-word translation or by a note on why I’ve translated things in a particular way.
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I’m an adept at reading the Tarot.
Notes on the Tarot.
It’s coming, hang tight.
Thank you. Your message is on its way to me, and I’ll reply to .
Something went wrong on the way. Your message is still here, so nothing is lost.
Try again, or email me directly at danieldaviswood@gmail.com.
You mightn’t guess it from this website, but I’m pretty reticent to talk about myself. All things considered, I live a quiet and unassuming life, with a lot of time spent thinking about literature and aspects of literary art. But if you’ve found your way here, that’s probably because you’ve come across one of my literary activities and you’re curious about the person behind the page — so, okay, I’ll share.
I’m the author of four published novels to date, with a fifth currently on submission. My début, Blood and Bone, won the Viva La Novella Prize in 2014, and my most recent, At the Edge of the Solid World, was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2021. Two slimmer novels, Unspeakable and In Ruins, round out the quartet. All four will appear in new editions in 2027. With a little luck, my latest manuscript, The Burning, will find its way into print as well.
In addition to writing novels, I’m also an essayist and literary critic, with a particular interest in contemporary fiction. My work has appeared in The Guardian, Meanjin, Areo, Necessary Fiction, the Glasgow Review of Books, and many other venues. It has also been shortlisted for the Observer Prize for Arts Journalism and a Sydney Review of Books Emerging Critics’ Fellowship.
All of my essays and other occasional pieces are available at Substack. Since I’ve been writing in these modes for almost twenty years, there’s a lot of material over there. Altogether, it allows for a tracking of my intellectual and creative development, which readers have variously described as “generous,” “forbidding,” “pretentious,” “difficult,” “emotionally intelligent,” “insightful,” “shamelessly elitist” and “evidence of amazing taste.” I’ll plead guilty as charged on all counts. Why not dig into my longform archives to see which judgments ring true to you?
In addition to working on my own writing, I edit and publish the work of others. I’m the founder and Commissioning Editor of Splice — a small press with a focus on adventurous, unconventional fiction and literary essays — and I’m currently the Fiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine.
I came to devote my time to literature via academia in the first instance. I received my PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Melbourne. My thesis, which was later published as a monograph, focused on the role of frontier justice in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy. While completing my studies, I also edited a collection of scholarly articles on the American novelist Edward P. Jones as well as the journal Antithesis. I taught literature and history for several years, too, though I’m no longer an academic with an institutional affiliation.
I live in the Tweed Valley, at the edge of the Moorfoot Hills, just outside Edinburgh. But I was born in Australia and grew up on the east coast of New South Wales before moving abroad in my early twenties. From time to time, I’ve also made my home in Sydney and London, as well as Boston, Massachusetts, and the Bernese Oberland in Switzerland.
I’m a hillwalker and long-distance hiker with a growing interest in bushcraft. I also love to draw (though I wish I had more time for it) and, in a strictly non-divinatory sense, I’m adept at reading the Tarot. Yes, I’ll happily arrange a reading for you if you’d like one; just put in a request using the form on the front page and I’ll reach out.
About Me
I’m a novelist, essayist, editor, and publisher, originally from coastal Australia and now based in the hills outside Edinburgh. I’ve got a number of books to my name, and lots of essays in a range of venues; all the details are below. Among other things, I also run a small press and edit fiction for a magazine. Read more.
My fiction is represented by the Shaw Literary Agency. All my reviews, essays, and occasional writings are now available on Substack.
Other than popping up occasionally on BlueSky, I’m not active on social media. The best way to contact me is via the form at the bottom of this page.
In a snowbound village in the heart of the Alps, a husband and wife find their lives breaking apart in the days and months following the death of their firstborn. On the far side of the world, in their hometown of Sydney, a man on the margins of Australian society commits an act of shocking violence that galvanises international attention. As the husband recognises signs of his own grief in both the survivors and the perpetrator, his fixation on the details of the case feeds into insomnia, trauma, and an obsession with the terms on which we give value to human lives.
A compulsive, compelling and lyrical novel, told with extraordinary empathy and emotional intelligence, this sweeping saga examines the nature of loss, the resilience and fragility of the family unit, and the stories we tell to explain the world.
There are, in a sense, many books in this single work, and their merging is gainful, like an alloy whose molten components are improved through complexity. … [It] is unapologetically demanding. … It challenges readers in terms of both form and content: facing its graphic catalogue of violence, keeping account of its many moving parts, reckoning with its philosophical deadlocks, and, at the end of a reading session, escaping its obsessive hold. Most extraordinary is Davis Wood’s ability to blur the boundaries between narratives until, from their yielding, edgeless form, emerges a new shape.
Naama Grey-Smith
The Australian Book Review (print and podcast)
A slow, deliberate, quiet novel, it often feels claustrophobic, as we are trapped with a narrator who unable to ever escape himself, who always sees his own experience reflected at him in the tragedies, losses, and atrocities that he chooses to contemplate. At the Edge of the Solid World is, nonetheless, remarkably absorbing reading. The direct, conversational, and carefully analytic description of the narrator’s own grief and turmoil is compelling. While it demands a lot of the reader and the muted bleakness of its subject threatens to become overwhelming, it is easy to become caught up in the meticulous, demanding exactitude of the narrator as he struggles to come to grips with his grief and his inability to satisfyingly connect his experience to that of others. It is a novel that is difficult in all the best ways, one that is hard to put down and equally hard to pick back up again.
At the Edge of the Solid World is a deliberately frustrating novel, as in challenging the assumptions of fiction, it withholds many of its expected pleasures — dramatised action, satisfying narrative closure, the revelation of meaning — and in so doing tears away its common, but illusionary, assurances. We cannot live the lives of others, see things as they do, feel their pain. And this is a novel that explores the limits of language and storytelling, their insufficiency in capturing the felt experience of emotion or articulating the interiority of the self. It is highly innovative, but in an understated way, without any stylistic or structural devices that call attention to themselves. The conflicts, connections and observations that offer the prospect or expectation of a turning point or a major change tend to resolve themselves anticlimactically, fading into silence as the narrator and other characters reach the limits of their understanding and capacity to communicate.
Julian Novitz
Sydney Review of Books
Daniel Davis Wood weaves the complex stories of individuals and families with history and culture, space and time. … The ripple effects of all the events in this account of [the narrator’s grief] are tragic, but the tragedy is enfolded in love and acts of tenderness and memory. It’s not a comfortable read. But it is an extraordinary read.
Jen Webb
The Guardian
Daniel Davis Wood is one of those surprisingly rare writers whose prose style and powers of observation do justice to each other. … One of the best things about this novel is the way it makes us think about the relationship between personal tragedies and human catastrophes on a grand scale.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
Utterly original… a detailed study in grief and empathy. This beautifully written novel places individual and personal human grief in the context of various massive-scale real-life tragedies, tacitly making the argument that the former is not diminished by the latter.
This novel does not bend to easy summation. On the surface it is about a man crippled by grief after the death of his newborn. But where other novels might cleave to a story of domestic drama — indeed his marriage does disintegrate — this one cleverly plumbs his inner world as he searches to understand this grief within the limitations of language and shared experience. … The narrator’s peripatetic mind investigates historical figures who’ve also grappled with loss and displacement, and the reader must tussle with the overlay of meanings this intellectually sophisticated novel animates.
Sarah L’Estrange
ABC Arts
A wormhole of almost solipsistic self-obsession. … Yet somehow, in the reading, you don’t feel this [book] lays on your shoulders like an anvil. It is a deep and dark book, on occasions. It’s complicated. It’s perhaps the most ambitious of the [Miles Franklin] shortlisted books. But there’s a sense that someone is wrestling with something profoundly important. … It’s a very interesting book, not for everybody… but it does reward the attention.
Tom Wright
ABC Radio’s The Book Shelf
A significant literary achievement. … A powerful and deeply intelligent novel that probes the extremes of human experience, a text about which you’ll be thinking for a long time to come.
Jeff Sparrow
The Saturday Paper
An ornate emotional vivisection… [The] chapters become intricately calibrated collisions, collapses in space and time… marvels of narrative engineering.
Beejay Silcox
The Australian
A beautiful, formally ambitious and wrenching book about mourning and empathy — a wonderful follow-up to Blood and Bone.
Adam Rivett
The Monthly
An artful portrayal of strong emotion, and of the functions and limitations of various kinds of empathy…
Shannon Burns (Twitter)
This ode to grief is sumptuously and gorgeously written, a nearly 500 page prose poem on the limits of understanding ourselves and others. … If you can stare down the sometimes graphic descriptions of some of the worst of human suffering, there is absolute beauty to be found in the weaving of the historical, biographical and folkloric.
Sarah (Instagram)
Astonishing. … The narrator constantly finds himself up against the limits (edges) of language, empathy, logic, and comprehension. He wants to know if each grief is unique, is it quantifiable, is it possible to give equal respect to every instance of grief? What is the face of grief, its phenomenology? There are many storylines in this novel, weaving in and out with each other so that, often within one paragraph, we are crossing boundaries of time place and person. … This is not an easy book to read. Its subject matter is dark and heavy, but it is one of the best explorations of grief that I have come across. … The writing is extraordinary.
Manuela (Instagram)
At the Edge of the Solid World was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 2021. Quite frankly, it should have won. It is not only one of the best Australian books published in the last year or so, I consider to be one of the best books I have read, ever.
Peter (Goodreads)
This book requires serious commitment from the reader. Daniel Davis Wood provides a dense examination of consciousness itself — in the context of tragedy, love, history, recompense, relationships, desperation, resilience, bureaucracy, morality, folklore, loss, grief, and existential inquiry. Delivered poetically with lyrical expertise. … To say this book is unique would be underselling it. To call it a masterpiece would be closer to the mark.
David (Goodreads)
Beautifully written, delving into grief and the way it fractures people’s lives…
Michael (Goodreads)
The best novel I’ve read this year. Intense, compelling, epic.
Kim (Goodreads)
I found this a complex and intricately detailed narrative on grief and mourning. It is both lyrical and poetic and jarringly violent and angry within the same paragraph. … A thought-provoking read.
Julie (Goodreads)
Exquisite and lyrical… dark and claustrophobic… brilliant and beautifully written.
Neil Lucas (The Book Lover)
A masterpiece.
On the origins of the novel (Necessary Fiction)
On the ethics of first-person narratives (Areo)
On reading during the redrafting process (Meanjin)
Launch with Anna MacDonald (video, transcript)
In conversation, Booktopia podcast (audio)
In conversation, ABC Radio’s Book Show (audio)
Under discussion, ABC Radio’s Book Shelf (audio)
MFLA 2021 shortlist press release (text)
MFLA 2021 shortlist announcement (video)
At the Edge of the Solid World
Shortlisted for the 2021 Miles Franklin Literary Award.
“There are, in a sense, many books in this single work, and their merging is gainful, like an alloy whose molten components are improved through complexity. … Most extraordinary is Davis Wood’s ability to blur the boundaries between narratives until, from their yielding, edgeless form, emerges a new shape.”
Naama Grey-Smith, The Australian Book Review
Before dawn one day in midwinter, a man in flight from a crisis returns to a city he lived in long ago. He has lost everything — his home, his security, his sense of self — and now he sets off on foot through the streets as he prepares to knock on the door of an old friend, to swallow his pride and ask for a place to stay. But something unnameable interferes with his plans. He takes a turn around a corner. Then he turns again, and again, and again. He wanders off on tangents, re-crosses paths he has already followed, and moves in ever expanding circles, aimlessly pivoting around an invisible centre. He hesitates. He prevaricates. He can’t walk towards the shame of doing what he must. He stops, lingers, tarries. He touches the surfaces of the city, opens himself to its tones and textures. He delves into the past, his own past and the past of the place, bringing to mind his bygone encounters with life on the edge of solvency. His is a record of borderline squalor, of exploitation, of begging to maintain the status of even a precarious existence; a history of minor humiliations, of frustrated ambitions, of friendships with the marginalised and kinship with the dispossessed.
In his follow-up to the novella Unspeakable, Daniel Davis Wood embarks on a psychogeography of Edinburgh which takes form as a dance between movement and stasis, exhaustion and relief, otherness and selfhood. Part prose poem, part autofiction, In Ruins strings a series of minor narratives along the coiling, looping pathways of an itinerant mind, a lost soul. The result is a story that purposefully goes nowhere — a story that in fact revels in its refusal to conclude, using words to postpone an imminent return to a reality both alienating and utterly without pity.
Repetition is one of the hallmarks of Davis Wood’s writing, with the story circling around continuously in a complex series of thematic variations. The protagonist of In Ruins thus finds himself at the top of a repetitious cycle, his third such iteration in this city. … For Davis Wood, the true author exists in ruins, “without a home, without a grounding, without a sense of my possible selves, starting everything over again for the third time in my life.” In Ruins is utterly compelling in the relentlessness of this artistic vision.
Peter J. Matthews
Westerly
In Ruins
“Repetition is one of the hallmarks of Davis Wood’s writing, with the story circling around continuously in a complex series of thematic variations. … In Ruins is utterly compelling in the relentlessness of this artistic vision.”
Peter J. Matthews, Westerly
In the midst of a brutal winter, a man commits an unspeakable crime. A decade after the fact, the fallout is pieced together by another man who was once a friend of the perpetrator. But as the free man tells the prisoner’s story, his words become marked by his efforts to do justice to all of the people whose lives have been touched by this singular event — and his search for a means of imaginative sympathy that might rescue the victim from her degradation.
Can sympathy alone rescue the victim from desecration and despair? Is moral imagination capacious enough to provide restitution? In hypnotic, lyrical prose, Daniel Davis Wood’s powerful novella probes the complex ethics of doing justice to the private tragedies of other people.
To write about trauma often involves exploiting it in some way, imbuing it with meaning or thematic resonance, using it to explore or expose some commentary or observation about the world or the human condition. In this regard, [Daniel Davis] Wood is deeply preoccupied with the ethics of fiction writing. He purposefully avoids naivety and the pretence of innocence, presenting a self-reflective awareness of the constructedness of fiction not as a form of postmodern playfulness, but as a moral necessity.
Julian Novitz
Sydney Review of Books
Unspeakable
“[Daniel Davis] Wood is deeply preoccupied with the ethics of fiction writing. He purposefully avoids naivety and the pretence of innocence, presenting a self-reflective awareness of the constructedness of fiction not as a form of postmodern playfulness, but as a moral necessity.”
Julian Novitz, Sydney Review of Books
2014, Xoum Books
Blood and Bone is the tale of a man haunted by the violent truths of his ancestry. Through his attempt to document the remarkable childhood of his great-aunt Abigail, we are thrown into life at the Whangie, an austere outpost at the colonial frontier.
With the death of her mother, eleven-year-old Abigail must learn to fend for herself against the cruel stewardship of her father. At war with the local Aboriginals and intent on staking his claim on the land at any cost, what occurs between the two is a stunning powerplay that exposes the limits of the human imagination. Inhabiting the speculative peripheries of the historical record, Blood and Bone is an uncompromising exploration of Australia’s dark history and its legacy today.
Blood and Bone fulfils two objectives: shedding light on a dark past, and exploring intellectual and aesthetic problems that the writing of such a story might create. … [T]he tale is made seamless by a tight structure and a hypnotic style that seems to owe something to the work of Gerald Murnane.
Kerryn Goldsworthy
The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
This story, dealing with failures of connection and the denial of shared humanity, is related through a framing narration that draws deliberate attention to the ways in which the author’s imaginative ownership of the narrative may be contested. … The narration describes the process of historical research alongside the story that it generates, and in doing so, he repeatedly reminds the reader of the distance between himself and his subjects. While his research into the period affords some capacity to recreate imaginatively the facts of their experience, [the] narrator acknowledges that his attempts to capture the internal thoughts, emotions, and motivations of nineteenth-century characters like Scrymgeour and his daughter are dubious, and that he is unavoidably perceiving them through the lens of contemporary values, knowledge, and language. … [T]his is true of all historical fiction to some degree, but the uncomfortably self-aware narration denies the reader the expected verisimilitude, constantly reminding us that what we are reading is an achingly incomplete reconstruction of the past.
Julian Novitz
Sydney Review of Books
What sort of a book is it? Is it a Gerald Murnane-Cormac McCarthy lovechild? It’s a little bit that, although it seems impolite to pigeonhole a writer in such a way; really, every author exists in his or her own beautiful orbit.
Emily Stewart (website)
This book sits at the very peak of Australian literature… Australians need to celebrate such talent [and] laud these brave and interesting literary voices… This may well be the finest contemporary novel by an Australian author about Australia.
Toby Fitch (Goodreads)
A powerful and brutal little book.
Leah (Goodreads)
Highly impactful, even shocking… an important novel.
Ilyhana (Goodreads)
This book was recommended to me and it didn’t disappoint. It is written in an unusual style with the author/narrator becoming front and centre at times, explaining how the story develops, and how he has attempted to fill in the gaps which exist in historical records. … The story is brutal and bloody and not for the faint-hearted but it provides an insight into a man, his daughter, and their struggles to survive in a very inhospitable place.
Lachlan (Goodreads)
On the research process behind the novel (Necessary Fiction)
Interview with Seizure on my writing habits and work-in-progress
Blood and Bone, Xoum Books
‘Blood and Bone fulfils two objectives: shedding light on a dark past, and exploring intellectual and aesthetic problems that the writing of such a story might create. ... [T]he tale is made seamless by a tight structure and a hypnotic style that seems to owe something to the work of Gerald Murnane.’
— Kerryn Goldsworthy, The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age
Edward P. Jones is one of America’s most celebrated contemporary writers. The author of Lost In the City, The Known World, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children has won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, a ‘Genius’ Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and acclaim from readers and reviewers alike. In Edward P. Jones: New Essays, seven literary critics come together to explore each of Jones’ extraordinary books in the first evaluation of his entire body of work. Also featuring a detailed biography of Jones and a discussion of his lesser-known early short stories, criticism, and memoirs, this volume is the perfect introduction to one of the brightest stars in the American literary firmament.
Edward P. Jones: New Essays is the first book dedicated exclusively to a critical consideration of the entire oeuvre of one of America’s most celebrated writers.
The volume contains an extensive biography of Edward P. Jones, drawn from dozens of interviews and personal essays, as well as two new essays on each of Jones’ books and one short essay on his uncollected juvenilia. I worked on the book throughout 2010 and 2011, writing one-third of its contents and editing the essays that appear in it.
In the process of putting the book together, I compiled a list of publications that I believe will prove useful to future critics of Jones’ work. The list includes all of Jones’ own publications as well as interviews with Jones and other critical analyses of his short stories and novels. In hopes of expanding both Jones’ readership and the critical literature on his work, I have made the list available here.
Arranged in order of publication. Short stories published in literary journals prior to republication in either Lost in the City or All Aunt Hagar’s Children are not listed here.
Arranged alphabetically by surname of interviewer.
Arranged in order of publication of the titles by Edward P. Jones, then arranged alphabetically by surname of reviewer or essayist.
On The Known World (2003)
On All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)
Arranged in order of publication of the titles by Edward P. Jones, then arranged alphabetically by surname of first credited article author.
On Lost in the City (1992)
On The Known World (2003)
On All Aunt Hagar’s Children (2006)
Arranged alphabetically by surname of dissertation author.
Edward P. Jones: New Essays
Edward P. Jones is one of America’s most celebrated contemporary writers. The author of Lost In the City, The Known World, and All Aunt Hagar’s Children has won the PEN/Hemingway Prize, the Pulitzer Prize, a ‘Genius’ Grant from the MacArthur Foundation, and acclaim from readers and reviewers alike. In Edward P. Jones: New Essays, seven literary critics come together to explore each of Jones’ extraordinary books in the first evaluation of his entire body of work.
Frontier Justice focuses on two of the most celebrated and influential writers of the American West. Both have written powerful narratives that focus on the disappearance of the nineteenth century frontier, and both show an interest in the dramatic ways in which the frontier gave shape to American culture. But is it possible that the kinship between these two writers extends beyond simply sharing an interest in this subject?
Teasing out the implications of the recurrent allusions to Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales in the pages of McCarthy’s Southwestern novels, Frontier Justice finds Cooper and McCarthy engaged in a complex legal and ethical dialogue despite the centuries that separate their lives and their work. The result of their dialogue is a provocative, nuanced analysis of the effects of the frontier on the American justice system — and, for both writers, an expression of alarm at the violation of the principles upon which the system was established.
Frontier Justice is a remarkable accomplishment, affirming the historical value of artistic expression and literary criticism as an enlightened instrument of ethics. It offers a new understanding of Cooper’s continuing significance [and his attempts to] constitute an American myth around a principle of justice that is at once arcane and of global significance. It also illuminates an ongoing debate in McCarthy studies, confirming that McCarthy’s work is centered on a deep sense that the ethical sphere is worth seeking and, through art, preserving.
Steven Frye
author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Frontier Justice impresses in its prodigious groundwork and its meticulous attention to the literary and critical appraisals of both Cooper and McCarthy. It is an excellent starting point for a discussion of American popular culture and literature in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and of the continued existence of the frontier myth and its place in American jurisprudence. It provides a significant contribution to James Fenimore Cooper and Cormac McCarthy scholarship, developing a valuable resource for future scholars of the works of both these authors.
Signe O. Wegener
author of James Fenimore Cooper Versus the Cult of Domesticity
Frontier Justice
“A remarkable accomplishment, affirming the historical value of artistic expression and literary criticism as an enlightened instrument of ethics.”
Steven Frye, author of Understanding Cormac McCarthy
Splice is a small press I founded in 2017 to publish adventurous, unconventional literary fiction and essays. In the beginning, its print operations comprised two interlinked ventures: a series of short story collections by individual authors and an anthology that brought together new work from each of these authors: hence “Splice.” These activities were also initially accompanied by an online review of literary fiction and non-fiction by other small presses across the UK and around the world.
Since then, Splice has evolved in several ways, sometimes by design — or at least by force of curiosity and a desire to experiment — and sometimes in response to circumstances. Covid lockdowns put the online review on an indefinite hiatus (but never say never again!) and both Brexit and the Trump tariffs have presented challenges in getting books into the hands of readers outside the UK. If you’re interested in the ups and downs of small press publishing, I sometimes write about these on Substack. Equally, though, there have been many highlights, especially following the decision to publish novels and collections of essays. Splice has now had books longlisted or shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edge Hill Prize, the Miles Franklin Literary Award, and many other accolades, and titles in the Splice back catalogue have been reviewed in The Washington Post, Le Monde, the Sydney Review of Books, and elsewhere.
The best place to become acquainted with Splice, its authors, its activities, and its aesthetics, is at the Splice website: ThisIsSplice.co.uk.
Eighteen months after I founded Splice, the first novel I published, Nicholas John Turner’s Hang Him When He Is Not There, was longlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize. This caught the eye of the book blogger Jackie Law, who asked me to outline my vision for Splice in an interview she ran on her website, Never Imitate, in 2018.
Jackie asked me to explain what I wanted to achieve by establishing Splice, and to describe how the various components of Splice work together in service of my aim.
I set up Splice in 2017 with just one idea in mind: I wanted to create a system for supporting the production of formally unconventional literature.
By “formally unconventional literature,” I mean books of any type (short stories, novels, essays, memoirs, etc.) that somehow push the boundaries of style and structure, whether subtly or in revolutionary ways, adopting and defending their own terms of formal “success.” I didn’t grow up in an especially literary household, and in fact literature didn’t begin to speak to me until I was in my twenties and out of university, so the notion of literature as some sort of refined pleasure, or something with cultural cachet, is absolutely anathema to me; it doesn’t jibe with my gut feeling. I value irreverence, iconoclasm, edginess, messiness, stylistic abandon, wilful disregard and even disparagement of literary politesse. If a work of literature plays by the rules stylistically and structurally, I’m flat-out not interested. I don’t care how provocative its subject matter might be; a book’s “success,” for me, is entirely a question of its aesthetics and their deviation from the centre of the literary landscape.
By “system,” I mean a series of interlocking mechanisms that could offer support to these sorts of books at different stages on their journey from the mind of a writer to the hands of readers.
By “supporting the production” of these books, I mean I want to support the authors who write them—but this is a very complex, multifaceted activity, and it’s worth looking at some of the nuances.
If you’d like to find out more about the origins of Splice, its back catalogue, its editorial vision, and its financial structures, I discussed all those things and more in a wide-ranging interview with Ben Lindner on his podcast, Beyond the Zero, in 2022.
Ben asked me for the advice I’d give aspiring authors who are considering submitting their work to Splice. The answer I gave in 2022 still holds true and is also the advice I give to myself as a writer, when I am submitting my own work elsewhere.
I think I would say to writers:
(A) Don’t submit anything unless you know that what you’re submitting is something that you have given everything you’ve got in you. Absolutely everything you’ve got in you [has to go] into that one book. If it doesn’t have that, don’t bother.
(B) You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are lying awake in bed at night — you know whether that book has everything that you’ve got in you, everything that you are capable of. So if you submit it hoping that you can pull the wool over someone’s eyes, or if you submit it with the view [held by] a lot of people I’ve received things from — which is that it’s not the best thing in the world, but it’s good enough, and it’s as good as a lot of other stuff [they’ve] seen out there — that doesn’t work. You know, in your heart of hearts, when you are making that kind of bad faith case for yourself.
For a press like Splice and a lot of small presses in the UK, we’re not interested in marketability. We’re not interested in where something sits in relation to other books in the market. We’re not always interested in having a product that we can sell. What we’re interested in is a piece of work that is innovative and true to itself on its own terms. That takes a lot of labour to produce, a lot of intellectual and creative labour, because [as a writer] you have to get yourself out of the market mindset and come up with something that escapes the prefabricated modes of thought and creativity that the market gives us.
You know whether you’ve done that when you are submitting something — and if you’re unsure, if you can’t say in, full faith, “Yes, this is a work that is unique and is authentically the best thing that I can possibly produce at this stage as a writer,” if you can’t fully [commit to] that statement when you’re pressing the submit button: don’t submit. Go back to [the work] and keep going until you can say that.
Splice
Splice is a small press I founded in 2017 to publish adventurous, unconventional literary fiction and essays. Click here to read more.
Fiction Editor
I’ve been the Fiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine since 2023. I commission, edit, and publish between thirty and forty pieces of prose per year. I say “pieces of prose,” not “stories,” because fiction at 3:AM tends to be formally irreverent, innovative, or indeterminate. Occasionally, I’ll publish standalone excerpts from novels that display similar qualities.
Over on Substack, I’ve written some notes on what I’m looking for as an editor, as well as some reflections on the qualities I appreciate about the work I publish at 3:AM. Very broadly, I’ve identified thirteen varieties of prose that I favour in one way of another:
Submissions to 3:AM usually open in December each year and close in January of the following year. In the call-out for submissions, I always say that I don’t really have a preference for any particular genre; I’m much more interested in form. Here’s my general advice: “The only requirement is inventiveness of style or structure — or, preferably, both. There are no prescriptions on what this might look like in practice — a short, sharp sentence of Lutzian terseness is as welcome as a Bernhardian rant — except to say that your work has to have a voice or a timeflow that distinguishes it from the sort of stuff that usually wins accolades.” I also recommend that prospective writers take a look at these dozen pieces of prose to get a sense of what I always hope to publish:
Here’s a complete list of the work I’ve published at 3:AM, alphabetised by author’s surname:
3:AM Magazine
‘I've been the Fiction Editor at 3:AM Magazine since 2023. I commission, edit, and publish between thirty and forty pieces of prose per year. I say "pieces of prose," not "stories," because fiction at 3:AM tends to be formally irreverent, innovative, or indeterminate. Occasionally, I'll publish standalone excerpts from novels that display similar qualities. Expand this panel for more details on my editorial interests and a list of the pieces I've published so far.’