3:AM Magazine

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

By Jude Cook. The following is an extract from Time Being (Salt) by Jude Cook: The news reaches Esther, like it reaches everyone else, on the last Friday before Christmas. The end of the autumn semester. London dripping with unhealthy vapours; the tawdry dazzle of the Strand’s festive lights visible from the university’s upper rooms. It’s by far the most shocking thing to happen on a London campus in decades. A lecturer shot dead – in apparent imitation of the Reeva Steenkamp case a few years b

By Young Rader.   I. Paul, with his good Christian name, wanted to mark his white damask caparisons and liturgical sandals and his cloaks, particularly the one depicting the Tree of Jesse, with a bold and original monogram, one that would immediately and resoundingly promulgate his high and uncontaminated standing in the world to everyone with seeing eyes, and so the boy, whose name he could not be bothered to learn, was brought to him. It was the boy, the baker’s son, who’d designed Manue

By Jonny Aldridge.   The Valley of Kings, 1922. Obstinate and impatient, Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon descended with their excavation crew into darkness. “If they go down in that spirit, I give them six weeks to live,” joked reporter Arthur Weigall. Carter—the self-made man, the scrappy adventurer—broke into the outer chamber, which released a plaintive gust. He clambered inside, the first soul in three thousand years to breathe that air. He paused before the sealed door which bore a f

By Susan Finlay. The following is an extract from Susan Finlay‘s The Ultraviolet Catastrophe (Zer0 Books, 2026): 24th December 2023, five days since the Mistake and ten months and 21 days until SALVATION (but this time it’s real)! Being a regular guy — that is, being downtrodden by the capitalist system as opposed to merely heterosexual and (possibly) patriarchal too — Hugh spent the best part of Christmas Eve alone at the Space, inputting the last lot of scientific data (which was

By Shea Hellenthorpe.   No one knows why anyone else is here. The Swiss consul, for starters, is searching for his ex-daughter. The country, he says, is remote; others say that eventually, her mien spectral, she may well return. Some give instructions: For proper aftercare, boil your ear in salt water for fifteen minutes, twice a day. If excess itching occurs, drown a gibbous. If you are struck by the need to vomit, or find yourself coughing uncontrollably, it is far more polite to excuse

By Andrew Gallix. Just a few thoughts upon reading Tom McCarthy‘s forthcoming The Rhyl Poster. Tom McCarthy’s The Rhyl Poster is, in my opinion, one of his very best novels to date, like a Graham Greene rewritten by DeLillo with a little help from Ballard. Remainder, his debut, opened with a reference to Simon Critchley’s work. His latest book is actually dedicated to the philosopher (who was also McCarthy’s one-time partner in crime at the International Necronautical Society). At the outset, a

By Guillermo Stitch.   My ‘novel’, The Coast of Everything, was published on June 16th (Bloomsday, cheekily enough) and in fairly short order had accumulated a number of lengthy reviews in prominent places that exhibited a conspicuously uniform hostility and (the author would suggest) misunderstanding. It was almost as if a memo had gone around — indeed, one reviewer explicitly suggests that one at least should have. But conspiracy theories are not necessary to explain what I see as groupt

By W. J. Davies. Guillermo Stitch, The Coast of Everything (Sagging Meniscus, 2026) ‘You must choose’, Samuel Beckett wrote in his novel Molloy, ‘between the things not worth mentioning and those even less so. For if you set out to mention everything you would never be done.’ For Beckett as a young author, James Joyce was the writer of ‘everything’ whose intoxicating maximalism compelled him to go in a direction that eventually led to the sequence of novels which began with Molloy and, by The U

By Richard Skinner. Alex Sharpe, We’re Nobody’s Children: David Bowie and Existentialism (Counterpress, 2026) In Alex Sharpe’s remarkable book, David Bowie Outlaw, she examined Bowie’s life and work through five lenses: Difference, Authenticity, Ethics, Art & Love. There has been so much written about Bowie since his death in 2016, most of which rehashes the same old material, but Sharpe’s book is different. She is a Professor of Law at the University of Warwick and looking at B

By Meghan Williams.   When I became a ghost, I kept going but the world went slack. The living drifted like continents. Sneezes bloomed slower than the corpse flower at the Chicago Botanic Gardens, which is where the blood clot got me. I quickly gave up on all that edification and headed south to Port St. Joe to see about killing my husband Swett. At first, I passed time floating through cars, tapping French fries out of passengers’ gaping fish-mouths. Outside Nashville, I drifted into a h

By Mary Byrne.   I have a new roommate. How is that? Stressful. He points at the bible and says he wrote it. Stephen and Helen cleaned the table with paper towels, then set out the hot tea and fig bars Helen brought. I don’t want to put down other people’s religious beliefs, said Stephen. It could be that my roommate wrote the bible. He copied it. Because he was studying it, said Helen. Stephen’s left eyebrow made a peak and his chin tilted. But I saw another bible in the dayroom, he said.

By Elte Rauch. Koushik Banerjea, Animal Nightlife (Conduit Books, 2026) ‘We read to know we’re not alone’ is a quote attributed to C. S. Lewis in Richard Attenborough’s film Shadowlands. Yet, seldom do we deliberately seek out books that take us beyond our comfort zone, confronting us with truths and perspectives different from our own. As a publisher, however, I often actively seek out books I might never have chosen as a reader. As an author, I am not even sure I would be the buyer of my own