3:AM Magazine

Daniel Davis Wood interviews Jeremy Fernando.   Questions of literary form are difficult to resolve, and probably moot anyway, when it comes to Jeremy Fernando’s The Adventures of Brandy & Bach. Recently published by Delere Press, Brandy & Bach looks somewhat like a collection of short stories—discrete episodes in the lives of its characters, and not just the two of its title—and Fernando himself refers to its narrative entries as “tales.” But it’s also a kind of hybrid text, shot

By Jeremy Fernando.   ‘So who is walking whom …’, Brandy mutters with a huff, her whiskers tingling in the air as if having a life of their own, ‘can you ever tell with people. And dogs.’ It is often difficult to tell if she were asking a question or making a statement. Of fact. Even if only her own. She speaks in muted tones so as not to disturb any of the muscles in her face. Or neck. Brandy prefers her whiskers to lie just-so, just so the world knows its presence is merely decorat

By Richard Skinner. Simon Roy, Kubrick Red (Anvil Press, 2014). When he was 10 years old, Simon Roy was home alone in Quebec skipping through the TV channels when he alighted on a scene from a film where a man is showing a woman and her young son around a huge food storeroom in a hotel and, as he’s showing them around, he telepathically asks the young boy, ‘How’d you like some ice cream, Doc?’ Freaked out, Roy ran to a house on the other side of the street where his mother was playing cards wit

By Sam Glover.   There is still a bit, I tell him, just a little bit, left in me, trickling out, it’s still trickling out of me, but soon there won’t be any left. It’s leaking, I tell him, the person sat opposite, trickling away, down my leg, pooling around my feet and across the pavement. It’s all that’s left of me, this trickling, and once it’s all trickled away there won’t be anything more. All that I’ll leave of me will be the puddle I leave behind. I’ll leave all that’s left of me beh

By James Riley. Simon Crump, Post-it Notes from Underground (Bluemoose Books, 2026) “So, what first attracted you to the cleaning sector?”. It’s 2005, I’ve just finished university, and I’m looking for a job. One of North West Lancashire’s premier office cleaning agencies seemed like a good place to start. My answer to the Area Manager – battle hardened, plenty of experience in the field – was a typical attempt to tick some boxes. I told her I was looking for regular work, regular money, someth

By Steve Finbow. Anonymous, Sanbashi: Toru Nakagami 1930-49 (gnOme, 2026). Last week, I received in the post a slim anonymous biography of an unknown – at least to me and until now – Japanese photographer, Toru Nakagami. The stamps and postmark were obscured and smudged, and I found no documentation within. Apparently born into the outcast Burakumin social group, Nakagami took his first photograph on March 10, 1945, amid the firebombing of Tokyo, capturing a dark photographic residue of the dev

By Madeleine Parsons.   Birthdays make room for hyperbole. Lee wants to use M’s as an excuse to write something worthy of the feelings she’s been harboring for her: Thank you for being the brightest star in my solar system. But when she considered tracing those words on the blank inside of the card before her, they sounded too familiar. Lee googled to see if that particular phrasing had already been Hallmarked, and it turns out, no. It turns out, the brightest star in the solar system is t

By Jack Houston.   Twenty-three days into the 1980s & Dad gripped Mum’s hand as she screamed, the midwife continuing her calm advice on how to breathe, how to push, how Mum should try & do both while not ripping her perineum during my little sister’s home birth, with me there too, I was, or nearly, in the next room, safe in the cuddle of Mum’s friend Shirl, neither of us watching the turned-right-up TV from the room’s two-seater sofa, the other armchair & the coffee table’s mug

By D. W. White.   Rachel Cusk, Life of M (Faber, 2026) There is a famous — if you’ll find some generosity in your definition of that operative word — interview that Rachel Cusk once did with The New Yorker, following the release of Kudos, the third instalment of her Outline trilogy. This was in 2018. At the end of a response about the nuances of Faye (the protagonist), Cusk tacks on the line, “I’m not interested in character because I don’t think character exists anymore.” Naturally, the i

By Elte Rauch. Josh Holton, Fledgling (Conduit Books, 2026). Fledgling is not only a homage to a dad — the rough and unfathomable creature that Stuart is unable to adhere to, make proud, or follow in his footsteps. It is a homage to the myth of man, to life itself and all its shit and hardship, and to the creatures that continue to inspire both myth and man: birds. In a marvellously entwined narrative, Josh Holton finds a way to tell the story of a harsh upbringing on a remote nature reserve, w

By Brian Willems. The following is an extract from The Surviving Cells (Les Fugitives, 2026) by Brian Willems. Ana is on her way to talk to Jonathan and his mother. They are already waiting for her in the conference room. In fact, they have been waiting for quite a while. Yet the doctor is not late because she has been seeing another patient. She is late because she has been sitting in her office, trying to figure out something else she can do, some other appeal she can make. She has come up wi

By Ed Komenda.   SATURDAY MORNING, SUN SHINING I jumped into the bed, tickled her neck, dug fingers into her stomach, jabbed her armpit. Mom pushed me off the edge, tired from the graveyard shift at Barney’s, where she worked as a waitress. I kept on her until she grabbed me with alligator hands covered with pink eczema patches. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe. Those were the mornings Dad made his famous breakfast. Bacon, eggs, fried potatoes, toast. We talked about The Wizard of Oz,

By Charlie Hill. At the suburban end of our suburban road is a sports and social club. There are tennis and squash courts, hockey and cricket teams. The booze is cheap and you can get a frame of snooker, so we sometimes go there for a bar meal but I never feel as though I fit in, largely because I don’t get on with the Madri-sluicing short-hairs who sportswear about the place: when they’re not watching golf on the oversized screen, they’re exchanging flaggy bantz and looking me and my suspect s

By Deirdre Shanahan.   It’s a sky-blue day. Fern leaves spike as I wade through. Strands of grasses and stray ears of wheat weave. Nubs of rosehips bristle on hedges. From the thick nettles bunched around my knees, I could make soup. I could use dandelions even if the blackberries are frizzled after months of sunshine. Warm days slouch as we settle in, plant and sow. Next spring, Olly says, we’ll reap the bounty. Then we’ll eat like kings. “Hi.” He sweeps up the road on the rusty bike we f

By Deirdre Shanahan.   The mirror says he’ll do. More than do. He’s made an effort though whether it’s in the right way he can’t tell. Too formal or not? On stage, years fell away and he knew he looked pretty good for his age. In real life he’s revealed. He’ll show he still cares. She’ll see him as he really is. As he can be. It’s not too late. He runs through the tangle of streets north of Oxford Circus but has to walk west for the church with the steeple. The place she mentioned. He’s ea

By Daniel Davis Wood.   Towards the end of August, I received the news that Deirdre Shanahan had passed away unexpectedly whilst abroad. Deirdre was a talented and dedicated writer of fiction—short fiction in particular—with an impressive track record as well as great promise. Her début novel, Caravan of the Lost and Left Behind, was published by Bluemoose Books, and her story collection, Carrying Fire and Water, was published by Splice. Through my work for Splice, I had the great privileg

Gerry Feehily interviewed by Andrew Gallix. Photo credit: Nick Knight The following interview took place on 5th July at Gerry Feehily’s spacious, immaculate apartment, located on a bustling street — close to the Pompidou Centre — which a famous listings magazine recently described as the hippest in town right now. The Paris-based Irish author sits on a plush white leather sofa, suitably attired for the latest heatwave in a green T-shirt and cream-coloured shorts. Tall and slim — a former m

by Katy Derbyshire.   Ian and Véro are gonna get married one day. And then divorced later on, but they don’t know that now. Maybe Ian knows about them getting married, or maybe he doesn’t. They’ve hitched to this town from Paris, where things hadn’t gone well. Nowhere to stay after Véro’s cousin ran out of patience with them crashing at her tiny flat, and the beer so expensive you wouldn’t believe it. More than in London, and Ian hadn’t thought that was even possible. Véro did warn him, th

By Nicholas Rombes. My relationship with Paul had been on shaky grounds to begin with, so when he asked me to write a letter of recommendation in support of his application to MFA programs I hesitated, inwardly of course, until finally agreeing. I’d had Paul as a student at Detroit University several years ago, a psychology major who had taken creative writing classes with me and who had a real talent for world building. Since then we’d loosely stayed in touch, exchanging writing with each othe

By Catherine Gammon.   It was hard, living on a hillside in Los Feliz, in a rented house with walls of glass, not to imagine the mountains surrounding the city burning. As if in a nightmare of perpetual fire. Lurking within the benign appearance, the appearance even of beauty, the beauty itself was the fire to come. Or something like that. If she still wrote fiction, this would have been the start of the story. She lived on the hillside just a few days, visiting her daughter, who did not l