3:AM Magazine

His Endless House was a shock proof shelter, like the rock-shaped formations of his Magic Architecture, rooted in primal regression but rather than being a hypersexualised elastic expression like Paris Endless the new version was rather ‘a palpable luxury of warm soft glowing atmospheres of multimedia affections.’ Kiesler exploded space creating endlessness through illusions that ‘sweep past the boundaries’ dwelling in a solid protective shell.

Richard Marshall reviews Stephen J Phillips on Frederick Kiesler.

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The novel’s topography is unmistakably London, though it’s difficult to pin down. The Bacchus Bar where the bohemian characters gather is reminiscent of Soho; the nearby school less so. There are echoes of Peter Ackroyd’s theory that holds the place itself, with its demands for sacrificial offerings, responsible for the crimes it attracts. Kersh, however, puts emphasis on ‘a certain midnight’ rather than the place, estimating the balance of probabilities thus: ‘God, as a gentleman, tries to think well of the watchful enemy, but Evil knows all the tricks.’

Anna Aslanyan reviews the reissue of Gerald Kersh‘s Prelude to a Certain Midnight.

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What seasoned Swiss director Simone Blattner did with Abraumhalde in the Kammerspiele Bonn is particularly interesting. Blattner cut up the usual monologue into six voices: five men and one woman. With a remarkably clear eye, Blattner made explicit what is sometimes only implicit in Jelinek.

Marcel Inhoff reviews a performance of Abraumhalde by Elfriede Jelinek.

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Engagement with the natural world is a key part of Seed, which is at once slightly odd and highly relevant. We engage with raw nature less than we used to, especially those of us who grew up before the internet. Also, this is a digital book, disembodied, not an object made of natural materials that can be touched, smelled, and experienced directly through the senses. So while there seems to be a certain nostalgia for the pre-digital world, it is paradoxically expressed in a shiny, postlapsarian, Google-labbed form.

Julian Hanna reviews Seed by Joanna Walsh.

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Gaudy Bauble is what happens when the margins/marginalised suddenly decide to chew on the centre by means of an avant-garde smouldering with differences in language and sexuality – the uselessness and toxicity of binaries as mechanisms of definition are, once again, gleefully exposed.

MH reviews Gaudy Bauble by Isabel Waidner.

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What Despentes means for me will not be the same as what she means for other readers – an obvious point, but the potential gap between the experiences of readers is so large here that it needs to be highlighted. Yet the back of my proof copy of Vernon Subutex I displays reviews and taglines suggesting a universal audience instead: ‘Who is Vernon Subutex? […] a mirror who reflects us all’.

Oscar Farley reviews Virginie Despentes‘s Vernon Subutex I.

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The story either gives grief-stricken trace lines an irrevocable source of resistance, or else anomalous forms of persistent humiliation. It works to estimate the situation. It’s a habit of secrecy being brokered over centuries. Narratives of intense corporeal excavations take place in night ears but are experienced in daylight eyes. Deranged adults and wounded children perform annulment stories in silence. The insane interrogative research of intense pressure seeks the other side of suffering, where the suffering ends not because it has been expelled or exonerated but rather because it has been liberated from its opposite.

Richard Marshall reviews Jack Zipes’ book The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.

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My reader’s copy of Found Audio has hot sauce splattered on its edgings. It’s been inked at the corners. Its cover is waterlogged. White innards poke through the cracked casing of its spine. These are the marks of having grappled with a novel, N. J. Campbell’s first, that stretches language, remakes structure, plots boldly, all while having its own peculiar kind of fun. What sets Campbell’s novel apart from most of its postmodern counterparts, though, is the scope of its metafictional component, which goes beyond the author’s merely entering the world of the book and interacting with its characters. Here, the reader is made just as integral to the story as the author himself. In doing so, Campbell casts new light not only on what makes something fiction, but on the role we as readers must play in it.

M. K. Rainey reviews Found Audio by N. J. Campbell.

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‘The Aleksandr Technique’ was inspired by email updates “written” by a toy meerkat during its shipping to the poet’s home. The meerkat in question, named Aleksandr Orlov, is a recurring persona deployed across media platforms by the car insurance company comparethemarket.com. As one of the company’s marketing tactics, a toy meerkat is sent to every customer that buys car insurance online. In response, Twose’s sequence cannibalises the affective appeal of the company’s gimmick – its ‘Aleksandr Technique’.

Dylan Williams on ‘The Aleksandr Technique’, from Sven Types of Terrorism by Gareth Twose.

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EFG is divided into three sections, 1) Naturacide, 2) exchange following and gene flow, and 3) J’etais Enfant Jadis (I Was a Child Once). The vitalism blowing through a torn mother earth is inhaled in lines that act as both channels and chatter, whose tone is unredemptive. The emotion comes from its clamour. Voices clang and chime. Each section contains a violence both distinct from and in tune with the others, while nearly every poem has a detectable ventriloquism—dead or disembodied voices laid into each other, sometimes lyric, sometimes scavenged. Sometimes the voices feel pained, other times they kid.

Megan Jeanne Gette reviews EFG by Valerie Hsiung.

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