In a perfect world, directors would be forced to submit reasons in triplicate for exactly why their films should run for any longer than 87 minutes. As we’re only just beginning the winter of bloated Hollywood threequels, it might be time to let your limited attention span guide you towards alternative entertainment.

One Story is a Brooklyn-based publisher of single-issue fiction – short novellas designed to be read in one sitting. Tired of only finding short stories sandwiched together in anthologies, One Story prints each piece of fiction as its own book. Their recent writers have gone on to win awards like Best New American Voices and Best American Non-Required Reading.

It’s available by subscription only – so you’ll have to find another excuse to lurk around bookstores and flirt on a Friday night – but even airmailed all the way to Melbourne, it’s only US$51 for 18 stories, spread out over 12 months. (Their store also offers monochrome slipcases for a year’s stories to help pretty up your bookshelf.) The editors say that “…there is always time to read one story.” And in under 87 minutes too.

By Martyn Pedler

Pikelet’s eponymous debut is an uncanny, down-the-rabbit-hole trip that remakes instrumental sounds with unabashed wonder. Terrifically paced, its intricate and slippery arrangements unfold with the beauty of a time-lapse photo; growing in lively directions and collecting and discarding layers at cloud speed. Whereas solo songstress Evelyn Morris, aka Pikelet, performs live with accordion, guitar, loop pedal and voice, this album is smothered in live drums, glockenspiel, tiers of vox harmonies and all manner of producer Casey Rice’s blooming mix tricks.

Highlight tracks Size Matters and Sewerage Man both tell stories of characters strangely displaced from the real. In the first, a tiny man – Noddy? – goes about his fantasy fun chores, and in the second, a waste-disposal man wastes his life away (almost too neat). Miss Her is beautifully melancholic drone pop lacing the morbid story of a girl gone missing with a haunting, stairs’ descent glockenspiel figure. Overall, this is classic Chapter Music; pretty cute stuff, but as one song title asserts, ‘It’s Not Childish’. Think the slow-food equivalent of Le Planete Sauvage or Pram.

By Mark Gomes

Westside was Conor O’Brien’s third photography book (after where The Heart Is and Oh No I Think I’m Falling). Published last year through Serps Press, it is a small, beautiful collection of landscapes and portraits.

Now, as promised, Conor is showing the photographs that make up Westside in an exhibition at Utopian Slumps (having presented solo shows in Perth and Sydney). The show represents a year in Perth, living by the beach. It will make you wish you weren’t in rainy Collingwood, but simultaneously glad you went.

By Penny Modra

Go on, admit it. We’ve been watching you anyway. The way you eye off those stiletto’s your co worker struts about in. How you wait outside that dress store drooling over that frock in the window night after night. And when you’re rocking back and forth sweating over your fear of the ten-year-old jeans you’ll inevitably wear again – that’s especially disturbing.

You suffer from a common social affliction known to most specialists as ‘fashion envy’.

We’re here to help. The remedy requires a trip to Hobo, which, as the name would suggest, welcomes the likes of poor little fashion famished you. Hobo survives on the benevolence of wealthy folk who have wardrobes bursting with labels (Scanlan and Theodore, Sass and Bide, Karen Walker etc). They grow quickly tired of last season’s pieces and cast them off. These pre-worn (and some not even worn at all) gems are then sold to you at new (lower) prices.

Take our suggestion on board. Or grow greener with envy and become a bitter old woman who eats three-bean-mix and dresses for ‘comfort’. It’s up to you.

By Isabel Dunstan

Remember what was said above about bloated running times and limited attention spans? Ignore it. New documentary Into Great Silence runs for nearly three hours, with almost no dialogue, little traditional character work, and no obvious dramatic tension – and without doubt, it’s one of the most memorable films in recent years.

The film follows the daily life of the monks of the Carthusian Order in France as they live in “the simplicity of God.” We watch as they silently prepare food, chop firewood, read their Bibles, and pray. Your attention will wax and wane, but that’s okay. Just like a drug movie can give you a contact high, this film induces a kind of meditative state, and when the monks light a single candle in an enormous, dark room, or they play in the snow like giggling children, the film pops with life.

If you’re thinking of seeing the real-life horror paedophilia doco Deliver Us From Evil, then Into Great Silence might be the necessary antidote. It won’t be for everyone – but neither is God, right?

By Martyn Pedler

Win:
We have two double passes to Into Great Silence to give away. Email win@threethousand.com.au with the subject line: 'quiet please'

The first thing you need to know about Cylk designer Lexi Lavranos is that she makes an awesome mix tape. The promo CD for Cylk’s autumn/winter 2007 collection features Plug-in City, The Rich, Children Collide, Midnight Juggernauts, Damn Arms, Ben Businovski and Hot Little Hands. (More on that later.)

You also need to know that her current collection (‘I went to the concert and I fought the crowd’) is all about silk and cashmere, high waistlines, high hemlines and icy shine. It’s inspired by rock, electro and new wave with a dash of Debbie Harry lippy and Jane Birkin style. With names like ‘Only here for the fun’ and ‘Saw him at the rocket club’, the clothes kind of sound like songs too. It all goes to show that talent doesn’t always need a big rider and a manager in leather pants.

Win: We have 5 copies of Cylk’s autumn/winter mix CD to give away. Email win@threethousand.com.au with the subject line ‘I’ll fight them for the mixtape too’

By Carla Ciccotelli and Penny Modra

Attention: those of you who have lived in a burrow for far too long. After turning a blind eye to independent publishing, it's about time you peel open your eyelids, draw back the suffocating curtain of mass media and head down to The Atrium at Federation Square for the Independent Press and Zine Fair this Sunday.

Wordmongers and zine fiends will let you taste their bitter, sweet and spicy morsels of wordy endeavour as part of the Emerging Writers Festival.

Apart from Sticky’s stall, be sure to sniff out What We Do Is Secret. Now out of print, WWDIS will be selling full sets of their publication including the never-before-printed final issue. It’s a zine so ballsy it would papercut you if it got the chance.

By Isabel Dunstan

It used to be a truck rental garage, now it’s a bakery. Actually it’s a commercial bakery, but it’s also a café. But don’t ask questions. Why argue with giant ovens radiating heat into a place where you can eat breakfast from 7.30am? Hell, bakers get up early, why not actually sleep there? No need for the nightrider, just ask these guys to let you in and wake up to a coffee and an outfit infused with the sweet smell of yeast.

There are two manual, three-lever Italian coffee machines (for those who get off on that kind of talk) and there’s a menu of gourmet sandwiches, baguettes pies, pastries, biscuits and shortbread.

Brought to us by Con Christopoulos (the brain behind Supper Club, Journal, Syracuse, Degraves, et al), this one’s a keeper. Of course it’s already at risk of being overrun by corporate meetings, so get down there and claim yourself some oven-frontage.

By Penny Modra