A Hermes Warehouse Operative derives sexual pleasure from the condoned destruction of Christmas presents. Paul Dunwoody frantically tries to report his neighbour for ‘having unprotected sex with Craig Rusby’. A sinister plot threatens to ruin Benny Blue’s birthday a.k.a ‘the most mental day of the year’. Claire Champagne infiltrates her local Torture Therapy Allotment and accuses her psychotherapist ex-husband of seducing a refugee. California dreaming in Greggs. Carveries with a married man. Drinking a pot noodle with a hand on one hip. Some of these writers are publishing for the first time. Others are involved in the publishing/ journo world. Some are in their twenties. Some are old hands. Many play in bands with names like ‘Snifany & the Nits’ and ‘The Pheromoans’. Most write stories about people Paul Dunwoody would term ‘the droppings of society’. I’ve heard them compared to everyone from Kathy Acker to Julia Davis to Dennis Cooper to Mark E Smith to James Joyce. And yet, when compiled together, their work takes on a weird aesthetic coherence due, in our opinion, to a shared talent for capturing the strangeness of living in boring morbid Britain today.