3:AM Magazine

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

By Charlie Hill. It was early summer and the news of the wars was bad. The weather, as usual, was unseasonally hot. This limited our capacity for cognitive resistance; instead we sweated on the possibility that each of these slowly unfolding cataclysms was less an aberration than an inevitable consequence of the relational systems of power in which we found ourselves enmeshed. Either way, we needed a night away from the city. A distraction. Somewhere we could breathe deep, fill our lungs with p

Tony White interviewed by James Riley. Picture: Chris Dorley-Brown Matt’s Gallery, Nine Elms, London, June 2026. There’s large crowd assembled for the launch of Tony White’s new novel, Phantom at the Feast. Phantom is the much-anticipated follow-up to The Fountain in the Forest (2018), White’s highly original police procedural featuring Detective Sergeant Rex King. Crime fiction is a perennial form, but as the great Maxim Jakubowski put it when he spoke to introduce White at the gallery, it’s ra

William S. Hayes interviewed by John Wisniewski. Photo by Jack Grisham 3:AM: Was it difficult remembering your life, to write Burden of Concrete? William S. Hayes: It was difficult to begin — for many reasons. But once I started it began to flow. I’m not sure how, but I didn’t destroy my recollection of the past. Piecing it together in a chronological order that was digestible and not boring to read was difficult, though. How many times can a person hear about one being released, yo

By Steve Finbow. The low rumble might have been a gathering storm, or the rhythmic drag of luggage over concrete – perhaps the suitcase of an Aeroflot stewardess, flushed and breathless from a post-flight fuck in the terminal toilets at Heathrow. Regardless, the sound breached his dreams. He lay naked and feverish in the dark, tracing the laparotomy scar that meandered from his sternum to his pubis like a string of alien rubies, contemplating the insectoid neuroses gestating within his sutures.

Tom McCarthy presents “Returns (on Bachmann)”, a performance-lecture delivered at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on 21 April 2026.

By George Berger. I want to start by saying something that will make you read the rest of this column, so let me say this:Joanna Rosenfeld is the most intense, brave and astonishing performer I’ve seen on a stage in the last 30 years, maybe longer. In any discipline, on any level.In a civilised world, she’d likely be famous, but she’s not, and that’s both OK (because it keeps the show small) and not (because it makes y

By Juliana Barbassa. Thie following is Juliana Barbassa’s introduction to The Jaguar’s Roar (Dead Ink Books, 2026) by Micheliny Verunschk.   On the white wall of a cultural centre in São Paulo, as part of an exhibition showcasing five hundred years of Brazilian history, are lithographs of two Indigenous children, a boy and a girl. Their images were part of a book by two German naturalists, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix. After landing in Rio de J

By Juliana Barbassa. Thie following is Juliana Barbassa’s introduction to The Jaguar’s Roar (Dead Ink Books, 2026) by Micheliny Verunschk.   On the white wall of a cultural centre in São Paulo, as part of an exhibition showcasing five hundred years of Brazilian history, are lithographs of two Indigenous children, a boy and a girl. Their images were part of a book by two German naturalists, Carl Friedrich Philipp von Martius and Johann Baptist von Spix. After landing in Rio de J

By Greta Kaluževičiūtė.   I am a dog. I am rabid. I bark, I howl, I bare my fangs. Spit drips from my mouth. I feel my anger boiling in black froth toward every living thing. As I run, I smell the fear and dread of people. One girl’s scent draws me in. I sink my teeth into her soft, welcoming thigh. I’m taken aback. The smell of fresh blood mingles with something familiar. Could it be you? I chew one body, then another, then a third. Girls, boys. Children. Other dogs. I chew and spit. Drunk

By Michael Ewins. U.S. Go Home, directed by Claire Denis, 1994 In the films of Claire Denis, music doesn’t just bring the body to dance – it retrieves the soul from bondage. In No Fear, No Die (1990), émigré Jocelyn drunkenly sways to Buffalo Soldier, cradling the rooster he runs in illegal cockfights. Beau travail’s (1999) Sgt. Galoup, excused from his command, dances The Rhythm of the Night in the club of his pre-Legion youth. And in 35 Rhums (2008), patrons of a café trapped by a rainstorm p

By Kent Kosack.   The musket ball. The museumgoer stares at it, a dull but once deadly sphere sitting stately and harmless in a glass case. A Rust Belt museum housed in a former Gilded Age tycoon’s manor. The exhibit is about instruments of war. The evolution of war. The musket ball. Its texture compelling. The surface of the moon, its myths and mysteries. The museumgoer stares. Memories fill his mind. A musket ball’s bloody journey through time. A nativity scene of sweat, muscles, molten

By Steve Finbow. Tony White, Phantom at the Feast (No Exit Press, 2026) The morning is a grey monotony, all that writing about dead televisions and the sun shining having no alternative. What one finds in London is that the buildings precisely match the colour of the weather, and if there is wet asphalt outside, then there is a decommissioned police station lurking somewhere for some reason. In London, one sees the nothing new adjacent to the nothing familiar. An uncanny city full of ghosts and

By Robert G. Penner.   After we sent the billionaires to Mars we sent the managers up into the mountains to plant trees and out onto the prairies to sow wildflowers, and although later the new forests grew up in unexpectedly tidy rows and the milkweed and the columbine and the goldenrod and the bergamot were all organized by color no one really minded, certainly not the bees. We were poorer, it is true, but even those of us that had been very comfortable before had to admit it was a better

By Charles Hawes.   First thing: you. That old void in your head. It’s winter. The sun is an itch in your eye. There’s construction, of course; the sound wakes you as the streaky slam of your loosely hinged door concurs with the recognition of some meathead from Staten Island bent grimacing over a jackhammer that shatters the sidewalk and with it any hope of civility for the day, or room for thought, normotension, tinnitus-free ears—no, this probably prejudiced Italian who likely shares No