Originally added as a sort of postscript to Andrew L. Wilson's generally excellent Linnaean Street but soon getting a home of its own at www.gargoyledaily.org (Jan. 10th), Gargoyle is something of an anomaly. Because the bulk of its content is delivered via links to other sites, it certainly can't be classed as a 'zine along the lines of, say, The Cortland Review or Slope. On the other hand, to call it a links page would be like calling Georges Perrier a cook or the Audi TT a sub-compact. Gargoyle is more ambitious, more organic — the product of considerable and obvious editorial effort.

Gargoyle.com is quite a new animal altogether: a sort of serial content aggregator, but with a modicum of original content added to the mix. Wilson himself describes the site (which, prior to Jan. 10th, can be accessed by clicking the gargoyle photo at the bottom of Linnaean Street's main page), as "a daily broadside of arts and letters." In keeping with that description, Gargoyle is updated each day with new links, along with one or two "features" (poems, stories or "odds and ends" selected from submissions) that may run for as long as a week. Like Linnaean Street itself, Gargoyle's design has been marked by an understated, 19th-century Euro elegance: from the faded postcard image of its namesake, sitting head in hands and sticking his tongue out at Paris below, to the faintly speckled off-white background and serifed fonts.

The site's signature look, however, is in no way suggestive of its content. In fact, the editors' tastes are about as eclectic as they come, ranging from literary golden oldies like Swift ("A Digression in Praise of Digressions") to Voltaire (Candide) to Rimbaud ("The Drunken Boat") to brand-new work from both knowns and unknowns. The Nov. 4th edition, for instance — a particularly good one (now housed in the archive) — includes links to Catherine Daly's delightful "poster" of poems from Mudlark 27, Timothy Russell's "Japaniad," the story of his 1999 journey to Japan as the winner of the 4th Shiki Internet Haiku Contest, and Jim Ruland's blackly hilarious "Uh Oh, Hat Girl" (from Exquisite Corpse).

To uncover such disparate gems, Wilson and fellow editor Bob Thurber must be surfing constantly. More than that, the duo have proved themselves more than able to spot treasure — like Jason Marks's photo essay "Elena in Cars," (just one of many goodies on Marks's nubrite.com homepage — in the midst of the Web's flotsam and jetsam. Whatever you call Gargoyle — 'zine, links page, Wilson and Thurber's personal literary wunderkammer — it's a welcome addition to the world of online letters and as good a place as there is to discover quality writing.