3:AM Magazine

• Home
• Reviews
• Essays
• Interviews
• Fiction
• Poetry
• Blog
• Submissions
• Twitter

:: latest features

• The Art of Intellectual Curation: Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones

  

  For those of us who got word of the book from farther afield, the quiet success of Solar Bones also helps us look closely at the resurgent interest in independent literary publishing. The novel has been widely praised as the sort of achieved work that only a boutique outlet like Dublin’s Tramp Press, in this case, would nurture and promote. But what is it that gives a book like Solar Bones its vanguard bona fides, aside from an obvious measure of formal risk-taking?

  Jeanne-Marie Jackson reviews Solar Bones by Mike McCormack.

• Plinth

  

  I grabbed my coat mid-film and made my way downhill at a brisk pace. The wind was against me; I had to pull my collar right up. I went to the butcher’s first as I had a funny feeling that the florist would be the one with the all-important news. I had to get the sequence right.

  By Christian Brookland.

• Per/sonals

  

  wind’s fing
  ers piqued
  from pen
  -umbra to p
  ink blot
  lips limn
  a Munch-like
  cut of wood
  n’t you like
  to k
  now now n
  ow

  New poetry by Greg Nissan.

• Mark Fisher, Neoliberalism and The Hall of Mirrors

  

  In his book Ghosts Of My Life he eloquently reframed the work of artists such as Joy Division and Burial to try and understand (and to an extent lament) the lost futures portrayed their work. Neoliberal policies deny the realisation of alternative futures, instead forcing a recreation of past moments until they become stultifying.

  Guy Mankowski on the polemical message of the late Mark Fisher.

• The Oddity

  

  Circe climbed on top of me and just dragged the point of the knife over my body. Sometimes she would stop and balance it on point on my skin, but never with enough pressure to cut me. I felt her press the flat of the blade against my face, against my arms, my legs. Then my balls. Fucking hell you don’t know fear until you’re tied up by some crazy Serbian woman who has a damn 9″ Bowie knife up against your balls.

  Chapter 12 of EJ Spode‘s novel The Oddity.

• Darwinian Creativity, Memetics and Some

  

  Memetics reduces again either to something trivial – no big news that there are cultural items that spread, right – or to something false: that they make copies of themselves and that they spread because of their properties. The last point, an explanatory analogy, is often taken to also imply that memes spread independently of the beliefs and interests of human beings, which is also wrong.

  Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Maria Kronfeldner.

• Arrows And Exit Paths

  

  I look at the miles yet to travel, the miles already travelled, and my eyes slide over them, slipping right off, forgetting in the looking. Just a few minutes have passed since I last forgot these strings of numbers, but it feels like ten, fifteen. The small pride I felt in my willpower trickles away, focus absorbed again by boredom.

  By Laura Waddell.

• Cons

  

  ‘Well, I’m not a fan of dead bodies either,’ I said. ‘I’m sure he’s fine.’

  She furrowed her eyebrows, which were thick and black and met almost to her nose when her face was straight; when she frowned, they merged.

  ‘That’s a very selfish position to take,’ she said.

  By Dizz Tate.

• Urban Fauna: A Review of My Life as an Animal

  

  Stone’s narrator is smart, funny, well spoken, and complex. Prickly, too. She finds her way in life, and in these stories, by challenging ideas and arguing with those close to her. If you’re looking for a sweet cozy of a tale about a 60-year-old woman falling in love and moving to Arizona, you need a different book. There is a sweetness here. But like fleur-de-sel chocolates, it’s complicated with an edge of salt—a fierce and demanding intelligence. Animal is the perfect book for that corner café table that Patti Smith writes about in M Train, where you read and reread books until you get the hang of their logic.

  Joan Hawkins reviews My Life as an Animal by Laurie Stone.

• The Oddity

  

  Albert Camus once said that the first question of philosophy was “why not suicide.” Well, he may just as well have said “the first question of philosophy is why not tear through your family and friends with a chainsaw and maim them and leave them psychologically broken for the rest of their miserable lives?”

  I’m sure this doesn’t sound very politically correct to you, but I don’t fucking care. You weren’t there.

  Chapter 11 of EJ Spode‘s novel The Oddity.