In the morning, sore and coffeeless, the light pale and cold, Theresa got us lost on the way back to her car and we found ourselves in an area that didn’t seem park-like at all, but rather hostile, alien, the landscape erupting in sharp, slate outcroppings like the scales of some enormous buried dragon. We got so turned around, do you remember? It was like it always is when you’re lost, a bit funny at first—the camaraderie of it all—and then not so funny. By Nicholas Rombes.| 3:AM Magazine
As a theatrical hypnotist, John-Ivan Palmer will make you crow like a rooster and chug like a wash machine. He will suspend a lady by her nape and Achilles tendons between two folding chairs and sledge-hammer a cinder brick on her tummy until her navel fills with grit. Simultaneously, with the other hand, he memorizes a complete issue of TIME Magazine at a glance, and is quizzed on specific pages by awestruck folks in the audience. By Tom Bradley.| 3:AM Magazine
I chose Sandford because of a photograph I once had. In it, I’m standing outside number 47 with a bottle of beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other; my attention has been taken by something out-of-shot and I’m looking to one side, at a cabbage white butterfly perhaps or neighbour sitting on her doorstep. I’m impossibly young, louche, invincible; I have the look of someone who has just struck an exclusive deal with the world that has left them impervious to the buffeting vicissitud...| 3:AM Magazine
and what is a queue for the pumps—flashy, pattern motos with missing handle-grips, side-panels scratched, in colors that don’t match, loose exhausts bobbing and ticking in the heat—clogs the gas station and spills out down the road—more pothole than road—of plastic bottles crushed into black mud, hard-packed under more plastic, more mud, more plastic, more mud, more plastic—autumn leaves on a forest floor, only autumn never comes down this far: it’s every rainfall, every flash f...| 3:AM Magazine
At the Holiday Inn café, having not had breakfast, he ordered steak and fries for a late lunch. It was difficult to cut the meat into bite-sized pieces with a knife, and even with the addition of salt and pepper it was flavourless and could not be fully chewed up. He poured it down his throat with the wine. It was like eating the sole of a leather shoe. Indeed, the leather soles of his wingtip shoes had been damaged by moisture. The rain never stopped falling. He was trapped by fickle weathe...| 3:AM Magazine
Here in Norwich the Plague has passed yet Grace says many are still unwell. This may be due to their children. They name them William and Richard and Alice and Agnes. Grace tells me the parents say to each child every night sleep well and the children sleep well but the parents are not well as far as she can tell. And me? When I was but a girl the Plague caught me and would not let go. My parents bless them fed me broth. They tried watermelon and kale and activated charcoal as well but alas t...| 3:AM Magazine
I was one with the cold / Moscow imparted, an import from the old Soviet days / A mixture of mud & snow on my western-brand boots, / as deep as my animus after all these human years / loneliness inexpressible since we left without him... A short story by Stella Fridman Hayes.| 3:AM Magazine
I would like a moustache, so I decided to perform a citizen’s arrest on the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Business and Trade. Like me, the newly-appointed Secretary of State for Business and Trade did not sleep altogether soundly. Sleeping was not one of his core skills, meaning he often went for long ruminative walks along the river at night, streets all slippery and bare, reduced threat of assassination/name-calling. I read about this on the Global Network of Interconnected Compu...| 3:AM Magazine
About a month ago, my father’s aunt Sylvia told me about our way-back-when ancestor who was supposedly displaced Russian royalty. Old Vlad was shy around cattle and preachers and liked to drunkenly poeticize about the Fatherland. I couldn’t remember a time when Sylvia didn’t have a rattling glass of vodka in her hand, and when she told me that story she leaned in close, her breath reeking, and said, “That’s why I am the way I am. You can’t stop blood, can you, Muriel?” A short s...| 3:AM Magazine
Carrington’s animals shift, transmute, and exit human epistemologies. Vik Shirley’s deer cannot. Instead, they persist—not because they expect to change anything, but because stopping would mean total submission. This is surrealism after rupture—after escape has been foreclosed, where the only remaining act is to endure. How we bring our despair through itself into an energy that acknowledges and transforms without self-deception—this is what Shirley’s deer gesture toward; however...| 3:AM Magazine
It's like mixing a record. What are you going to foreground, what is going to sit so low in the mix that it acts subliminally? What I'm looking for in writing is language that's concerned with what is inexpressible, which is a language moulded by pressing itself against the ineffable... I have a dream about writing a very quiet novel, one that mixes Blanchot with Marilyn Robinson or something. Maybe that will be my 'domestic' novel. Thomas Kendall interviewed by Chris Kelso.| 3:AM Magazine
I never studied fiction. I play on experimental stuff, and I do all these other things, but I don't know how to do a lot of stuff and I don't wanna know how to do them. I never learned how to do those things. I can't do it. I don't like plot. I don't like psychological development. I don't like all that stuff, but I also don't have a fucking clue how to do it. I've read very, very little science fiction literature, like very little, very little. I like genre. I used to like detective novels a...| 3:AM Magazine
I was late for work and in more of a mood than usual, partly because I’d just learned I’d been to school with the full-time poet Brian Bilston, who doesn’t write this kind of stuff. I’d fought with Brian back in the day, but then I’d fought with everyone back in the day so there was nothing new there. Me and Brian had been at a playdate at Kevin Hyde’s house. Kevin’s parents had looked on, perplexed – they were God-fearing people – as the fists flew. Kevin Hyde was the only ...| 3:AM Magazine
Call comes in on the phone. Now just what is this, Buck thinks. Who the hell could that be, Buck thinks. Ain’t took a call in years, he says. Room got real still after that, like the room was listening to Buck. Room ain’t heard Buck speak in years, room thinks. A short story by Matthew Dix.| 3:AM Magazine
In about seven and a half billion years, the Earth will lose its orbital energy and drop into the path of the sun, putting an end to our little planet’s life. But what if this happened next month? “Because of an accident within the gravitational system,” C.F. Ramuz coolly informs us on the second page of Into the Sun, his 1922 novel of fiery apocalypse, “The Earth is rapidly plunging into the sun.” In case you weren’t sure what that means for us, Ramuz minces no words about our ul...| 3:AM Magazine
I wondered, so I asked Vivian why she was still single. As Communications Director for The Old Rats Motorcycle Club LLC, she was surrounded by men. Powerful men, exciting men, hoary and bearded men. She had her pick. Vivian began to speak about her Old Rats leather motorcycle jacket. I assumed she was being metaphoric. What followed was an unbelievable tale involving the Cult of Saint Syncletica in the eighteenth century and their demonic thread. I just went with it. Long story short, the thr...| 3:AM Magazine
On the other end of the line is Laura (Lee Remick), drenched in a trench coat. “It’s not just this,” she says, removing her large black glasses for Paul later in the film, indicating her bruised eye, “you should see all over.” She can tell from the way Paul looks at her that he wants her, but also (and more embarrassingly) that he’d never act on it. And – by her onscreen music, costumes, and glances – we know that she’s a catch, yet we are terrified of her. She alone knows t...| 3:AM Magazine
Artists, literary and otherwise, not only don’t stay in their lane, they go against traffic. And they often avoid the highway altogether! They swim! They fly! We ought to encourage conscientious border trespass, conscientious border abolition. That is, we ought to encourage writers to write compassionately, lovingly, and otherwise intelligently and empathetically from the imagined perspective or perspectives of an “other” or “others.” In fact, this is arguably what all great writers...| 3:AM Magazine
This is the dark underside to Romanticism, the movement that gave us Byron, Blake and Shelley, but with figures such as Kleist, also the beginnings of the violent anti-rationalism which would feed into fascism. And just as Romanticism was in part a revolt against grey utilitarianism, so its darker descendants today are able to tap into the many who feel adrift, abandoned or just plain bored and disillusioned with the modern liberal world, seeking something more primal and primordial. As Sonta...| 3:AM Magazine
They knew, considering the price and the location, that the place would be desired, but not that the line of people would stretch out the building and round the corner, even thirty minutes before the appointed hour, so they hurry to the end of the line which keeps getting longer behind them, comically so, as one made sure to acknowledge to the others with little glints of eye, or a curt puff of air from nostril, the wait interminable, interminable, before the first little budge, oh the giggle...| 3:AM Magazine
My whole life I’ve been a fraud. I have come to accept this with the help of writer Daniel W. Foster and violinist Friedrich “Fritz” Kreisler, the latter of whom (in 1905, hoping to draw attention to his concerts) composed a piece he fraudulently attributed to the legendary Gaetano Pugnani.[1],[2] And but here’s the thing: It’s amazing. It’s a fraud and it’s a soaringly beautiful piece of music. You might even say genuinely beautiful, if you’re in the mood for a paradox, which...| 3:AM Magazine
Elizabeth Ellen’s prowess at character concoction is readily apparent from the first page. In lieu of standard dialogue, she does something marvelous: relays story through vignettes that are not only meticulous in craft and heft, but self-sufficient ecosystems of plot, characterization, and symbolism. These self-contained vignettes function as linked accounts of the unfolding narrative and are also blatant reminders of the cinematic quality of Ellen’s writing. Mary Buchanan Sellers review...| 3:AM Magazine
I think the other thing which people don't get, although Alan Moore did in his introduction to The Psalm Killer (1997), is whether I'm a novelist at all, because my whole approach is not that literary, it's cinematic. The way the writing is, it's cinematic, and essentially, it describes what you see. I wrote Robinson because I couldn't make films anymore, and I thought, “Well, I'm not a novelist. I don't want to win the Booker Prize. I don't really care about the whole literary scene.” I ...| 3:AM Magazine
I found the salmon in the middle drawer of an old dresser in my closet. I was looking for a hammer, but I couldn’t remember why. The salmon was a chum salmon, the adult version of the ones running in a nearby creek. It had a greenish tint to its skin and red ridges on its sides. The chum filled the entire drawer. Nothing else was inside. I couldn’t tell if it was alive or dead. A short story by Ryan Bender-Murphy.| 3:AM Magazine
Zac [Farley] and I, we shoot it together. We edit it together and everything is completely equal, but for sure he has a real strong visual sense. I went to film classes when I was in college because I wanted to make films and realized very quickly when I started taking classes and trying to make films that it was just terrible. I could not do it. It was terrible. And I saw the other people in the class making these things and I was like, ‘oh, I can't’. So, I just gave up, but I always wan...| 3:AM Magazine
So begins the first dialogue in Gerry, a full nine minutes into the film, as the two Gerrys ditch the trail and instead head out into the desert itself. Which is to say, life itself. Maybe. Probably. The thing that awaits us all at the end of the trail, so to speak. A finality. No matter your attempts to put it off, to detour yourself, to meander and wander, you’ll still end up there, at the same final exit that one of the Gerrys ends up. In a new series curated by Nicholas Rombes, writers ...| 3:AM Magazine
She’s not concerned with how she looks. This is no cautionary tale about vanity or performative femininity. Something else is happening here. Our girl is not looking to be told she’s cute. And whatever she’s looking for, I sense, she’s not so sure she wants to find it. Her eyes are searching, pleading, unguardedly expressive — in other words, they are heartbreaking. By Lindsay Lerman.| 3:AM Magazine
Turner, to the contrary, is no drone. His musical theme is jazzy, spontaneous; it clashes with the static-like white noise of the computer’s scanning device, its spinning tape reels and nonstop dot-matrix printing. Forever late to work, Turner prefers — like Bartleby the Scrivener — not to become a smoothly functioning cog in a mechanism that he perceives as alienating. Across a New York City whose streets are dominated by hulking cars and trucks he rides a Solex, the French motorized b...| 3:AM Magazine
It's interesting because there are moments in this film I find physically painful to watch. There’s a moment when Hoffman’s character is putting together this massive production in a warehouse the size of the city and it becomes so introspective that I can hardly bear to look at it. I think I chose Synecdoche for a piece of criticism like this because I knew it wouldn’t mean I’d have to watch the entire film again, and I don’t know what that says about me or about the work, to be si...| 3:AM Magazine
The first five minutes bring us into the world of the archetypal white supremacist — the one who basks in eugenics, the one who is filled with rage, the one who spews hate with a ferocity that is only matched by a perverse delight. But by minute 6, the scene shifts to a different figure, the ordinary racist, in a place where racism isn’t dressed in white robes, where it subtly, but no less insidiously, finds its way into institutions — like the police — that are deemed respectable by ...| 3:AM Magazine
If the patriarchy defines the rules of the society in which the narrative is set, however, then it sits on the periphery. The focus, instead, is on how desire builds and is felt, as Marianne and Héloïse become lovers. The relationships in the film that are defined by power, ownership and oppression, are the antithesis of the one formed between Marianne and Héloïse. As the latter begins to paint the former we see an affair born between equals. And, tellingly for a film that is about the re...| 3:AM Magazine
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve seen Performance. I’d seen it thirteen times before 1976. No matter to which strata of the sclerotic British class structure you belonged in the early seventies, you were woven into the social fabric by the music you absorbed, the books you read, the bands you saw, the squats or rentals where you lived, your connections to the hardcore criminality of the drug scene that fuelled the sixties/seventies outsider culture. By Des Barry.| 3:AM Magazine
In the popular imagination, dead babies go to heaven to pray for those left on earth; they become tiny lawyers, representatives and advocates of those lucky or unlucky enough to stay behind. In this idea, and Violeta's lyrics, which she picked up from conversations with people in bars and plazas during her travels through Chile, there is a belief in terrestrial reincarnation, similar to that of certain Eastern religions. Each death is mysteriously linked to the seed of new life; substance bec...| 3:AM Magazine
They are smoking and chewing gum and talking about desire in each preceding scene, of which there are four, all saturated in visceral blue: a mood, a reflection, an evocation of sex, the hottest part of a flame. We are piecing it together, one fire at a time. Everything points to an emergency, but Anne, the narrator, is strident in her denial and refusal to acknowledge her own looming catastrophe. Christine Hume on the 9th minute of Happening by Audrey Diwan.| 3:AM Magazine
Torrential rain and flickering neon, pedestrians of miscellaneous ethnicities bump umbrellas, struggle through tight alleyways between a downmarket electronics store and a line of crowded street-food stalls. Seated at the counter of a sushi bar, close-up on his face and open shoulders, an unnamed man in a noir-style classic trench coat rubs the splinters off his chopsticks. Behind his right shoulder appears a uniformed torso with a police badge pinned to a bulky stab-vest. The cop has a deep ...| 3:AM Magazine
The engine powering this parade of off-kilter lookalikes is the planet Solaris itself. It shows a disconcerting penchant for reaching into people’s minds and fashioning physical manifestations of whatever it finds there. (Kris and company dub these apparitions “guests,” in part because they have no idea what the visitors really are, but also because anything more precise risks existential horror.) The arrivals are seldom comforting, but always revealing. Solaris sends Kris multiple copi...| 3:AM Magazine
As if in the 25 years both fictional and real that have transpired between season two and season three of Twin Peaks, those two now-quaint categories of perception and experience have been on a collision course with each other — the real, unfolding in painstaking and incessantly cached broad daylight, while the fictional has festered about its Twin Peaks business in parallel, a black box stashed beneath the underside of some forested log — only to emerge and converge upon the temporal coo...| 3:AM Magazine
