Twitterature is more like T-ball: The risks, the stakes and the degree of difficulty are all gratifyingly low. And “Glue,” which takes about 20 minutes to read and which was “published” within a 24-hour span, has laid its modest claim on the public’s attention with more stealth than hype. @Bitchuation, which Mr. Soderbergh has acknowledged as his but which does not bear his name or the blue-circled check mark of Twitter authenticity, has around 6,300 followers.Which would be a not-bad readership in the world of letters right now.

Image Excerpts from "Glue," a novella published on Mr. Soderbergh's Twitter feed.

Twitter narratives are not new; The New Yorker tweeted a story by Jennifer Egan last year, and the piecemeal republication of beloved works in bite-size increments is kind of a thing. But @bitchuation, which previously consisted mostly of possibly tongue-in-cheek epigrams (“The time has come for some empty rhetoric, because without it we make sense and nothing else”), is nonetheless in the vanguard.

The point of his experiment seems to be to isolate the minimal elements of a story. There is a protagonist — “you” — who has witnessed his own funeral, and who is involved in the globe-trotting pursuit of a mysterious object or substance identified as #&%#. Hopscotching among European capitals (London, Amsterdam, Paris, Rome) you encounter various colleagues and enemies, all of them identified by a single letter (can’t waste characters!) including a femme fatale known as D.

The style — skeletal tough-guy sentences; cynical asides; pointillistic descriptions; bursts of violence — owes something to Dashiell Hammett, Samuel Beckett and maybe also the French nouveau roman of the ’50s, which specialized in chilly, knowing deployment of familiar narrative codes. But “Glue” is perhaps best understood as a Soderbergh film carried out by other means. The novella so far is both thrilling, with intimations of sex, danger and treachery, and cerebral, inviting you to admire its craft while also succumbing to its effects.

Is it a screenplay in disguise? The attached twitpics do resemble master shots, and some of the writing sounds like instructions for directors, actors and editor. (“Then complete silence. Then darkness. A beat. D appeared at the door.”) But it is too early to assume that Mr. Soderbergh is kick-starting the self-aware genre exercise that will bring him out of retirement (and that would cost somebody a lot of money to make, at least if it uses real foreign locations).

“Glue” is assuredly not, or at least not yet, a movie. But by its author’s own definition you could certainly call it cinema.