3:AM Magazine

“We seemed to have run out of things to say. Then the young man put his hands on the table and announced resolutely that he wanted above all to avoid metaphor, to avoid allegory and metaphor. He looked at his hands as though he were about to lean down, stand up and leave…”

An exclusive pre-publication excerpt from Suite for Barbara Loden by Nathalie Léger, trans Natasha Lehrer & Cécile Menon

The session begins, and Woman makes her great appearance. She will try to put together a scattering of gestures and sentiments, turning them into one single image — telling a story in one single moment. She makes herself present, she turns, turns around, applies herself, then moves away. Look out, look out! Go! During those same years, the illustrious magician Robert-Houdin wrote a manual on conjuring whose eighth recommendation was: ‘Although everything said during a session may be, in a word, nothing but a web of lies, one must immerse oneself deeply enough into the spirit of one’s role in order to believe oneself in the reality of the fables being uttered.’

An extract from Nathalie Léger‘s Exposition (Les Fugitives), out now.

If DeLillo’s ambiguous American voice looks for its place through roving across the multitudinous American landscape in Underworld, then in The Mars Room, Kushner looks to place her voice in two confined spaces, the strip club and the prison, contrasting various forms of solitude, through circumstance, through choice or as a mode of self-protection. Though the novel itself is made of voices, they are solitary – the perspectives from which they write are uniquely alone.

Katie Da Cunha Lewin reviews The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner.

The photography of Wim Wenders. * “The Dreadful Mucamas” by Lydia Davis. * Spiderman and fetish art. * An interview with Peter Markus: “Can fiction do that, make a world that is its own, a world that isn’t anchored down by the world in which it is actually written in? Of course it can“. * […]