3:AM Magazine

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

:: latest features

• King of the Cobs

  

  He lowers his bottom jaw until he feels tension in his eardrums. He’s a Burmese python, a rewilded descendant of an exotic pet discarded in the swamplands. Opens wide and inserts the first of his Jersey corn-cobs longways in. Clamps his teeth down when the gag reflex says present, pulls the cob back and scrapes the kernels offworld into his mouth. Golden popping rows.

  A short story by Tom Laplaige.

• Dear Elizabeth

  

  Holy fuck! Are you still fucking here? Why haven’t you fucked off already? And fucking hell, aren’t you fucking ashamed of the way your fucking “Firm” treated that poor girl Meghan? Fuck off with asking what skin colour her child would be. What the fuck is that? What the fuck is wrong with you all? Actually, no fucking need to answer that. We fucking know. We even saw you shielding Prince fucking Andrew for fucking noncing. So we know exactly how fucking low you can go and it’s the fucking bottom of everything you abusive bunch of absolute fucks.

  Sam Jordison celebrates the British Royal Family.

• Duos #19 – Adverts for Actual Hats

  

  The poems are taken from a series, Adverts for Actual Hats, in which William Repass and Dan Ivec observed a number of Ivec’s illustrations – all featuring a hat of some sort – and dreamed together prose poems which act as deranged commercials for the hats seen in the drawings. If the reader is understandably covetous of such headgear, they may direct queries via Instagram: @escalator_harrison

  In the 19th of the Duos series, new poetry by Dan Ivec and William Repass.

• Poem Brut #114 – The Goddess Lens

  

  Paula
  Rebirth
  Destruction
  Wisdom

  In the 114th of the Poem Brut series, new poetry by Pascal O’Loughlin.

• The Moon Down to Earth

  

  Given the unique elements to The Moon Down to Earth, I opted out of a traditional review. Instead, I gave another voice to its conversations through the format below — assembling a cut-up into Jace’s bicycle wheel/the pizzas he delivers, the spokes/slices representing the book’s eight vital characters.

  Gabriel Hart reviews James Nulick‘s The Moon Down to Earth.

• Seal Club Furies

  

  Like Francis Bacon’s ‘Furies’ there are moments when these tales are bent out of shape, by history, or by the sheer cumulative weight of their own melancholy. But then someone will stand a round, or Frank Begbie will fleetingly renounce violence, or Fossenkemper issue an unexpected sexual directive, and a more fluid commons will once more find its feet.

  Koushik Banejea reviews The Seal Club by Alan Warner, Irvine Welsh and John King.

• The Horwitz Conundrum (Solved)

  

  In September of 2003, during Scott’s first year of grad school, two years after he’d set that dumpster on fire, a young undergrad named Millie Dufresne set off a series of pipe bombs on campus, shutting down the school for eight days. Scott had seen Millie almost every morning, as she worked at the coffee shop right off campus. She was a friendly girl who’d always smiled when she asked how his day was going, which had always seemed like a stupid question, as it was 7:30am and the day hadn’t even been given a chance to fully develop. But she’d always smiled and said Awesome! every time he told her his day was going okay.

  Read an extract from Jeff Chon‘s forthcoming novel, Hashtag Good Guy with a Gun.

• Metal Face Dada

  

  We can then see MF DOOM not only as a fiction, but the universe of that fiction, and how the tenets of that fiction reflect/refract the problematic fascinations of our reality. DOOM is then, within that definition, a pastiche, a costume, an ethos, a topos, and in that, a literature.

  An essay by Eric Tyler Benick on MF DOOM.

• Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us

  

  The X-ray shows an opaque stain on a lobe of the right lung. Fernand has no precise idea of what this means, beyond the fact that the statement’s length invites the interpretation that what he took for a common cold, caught after a soccer match in Algeria, may be a more serious illness. Very probably tuberculosis.

  An excerpt from Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us, the first novel from Joseph Andras.

• Zahir: Desire and Eclipse

  

  The suggestion here is that the ‘I’ (like the ‘it’ in expressions like ‘it is raining’) is simply a verbal construct — a placeholder for an agency which only exists in language and whose entire being consists in ‘a name’. For Borges’ narrator, the Zahir destroyed his identity; for this collection, it simply revealed the existing cracks.

  Accordingly, much of Zahir treats language with a degree of distrust.

  Oscar Mardell reviews the Zahir: Desire and Eclipse anthology edited by Christian Patracchini.