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Interviews

R. Mutt in Hoxton

Ars longa, vita brevis — this is the tragedy at the novel’s heart. It should be underlined that the best art really does last for a very long time. We are still living with the art and through the art that the Hoxton and Shoreditch scene gave birth to. Over the past three decades it’s been one of the most prominent cultural influences on London, and it has risen to become a formidable driving force behind huge amounts of global art and culture. Who would have thought that could have emerged from all that poverty and craziness enacted in those crumbling old warehouses back then?

Peter Carty on his debut novel, Art.

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A British Distance: Lars Iyer Interviewed

It was only by discovering a British distance, perhaps a class distance, with respect to the high cultural stuff I venerated that I could find a persuasive voice in fiction. Because fiction doesn’t need to be ‘high’: it doesn’t have to resemble Nerve Scales or The Malady of Death or The Stream of Life or To Live the Orange; it can be written in the prose of the world — our world, and be populated with people like us.

Markku Nivalainen interviews Lars Iyer.

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The Naming of Moths: An Interview with Tracy Fells

As an only child, I spent a lot of time entertaining myself and began creating stories about objects around me. I remember announcing I would be a writer at about age six, when I started writing stories to be read out in class, but then life (career, motherhood, etc.) postponed that ambition till my mid-forties. A side-effect of leaving my twenty-year career in clinical research was freeing the head-space needed to seriously start writing, but first I read and discovered many wonderful short story collections. Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber was an epiphany, giving me permission to write the stories living in my head. Until then I’d not known magical realism was a ‘thing’. Carter’s fiction launched my writing career.

Katy Wimhurst interviews Tracy Fells.

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Travisland

I am essentially against all countries and, if I were to run the world, would rather opt to dissolve all borders and allow for total freedom of movement. Nationalism is, I believe, one of the great banes of existence and sources of violence, war, and conflict. There’s one easy solution to this problem: just get rid of all nations. So yes, elect me global dictator and the world will be a much better place! 

Travis Jeppesen interviewed by Oskar Oprey.

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Q&A: Jared Pappas-Kelley, Stalking America

There’s this impulse of cutting to see what lies behind: carving windows as an excavation, exposing what remains or bleeds through, but not in a static way—seeking a sustained act of cutting-through in order to construct. Without that constructive aspect, it’s more of an autopsy of something gutted, or just a cluster of holes—that’s something else.

Jared Pappas-Kelley interviewed by 3:AM’s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.

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Millenial Edgelord: An Interview with Susan Finlay

When I was at art college, the question of Identity with a capital ‘I’ was a big thing. I remember Anouchka Grose coming into give a guest lecturer, and how she used the example of a shopping list to explain the ways in which identity can be regarded as being in a permanent state of flux: if the person who made the list was the same person as the one who arrived at the shop, then the list would be obsolete. Rather, you write things down to remind the future you of what the past you thought that they would want. This really stuck with me, not only the idea of different selves, but different selves leaving reminders for each other, and trying to predict who else they might become.

Andrew Gallix interviews Susan Finlay.

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Brotherless Night: An Interview with V.V. Ganeshananthan

The book is certainly preoccupied with bearing witness. This is part of my own reaction to understanding how certain narratives were presented to me and to others, as though they were total and complete, when in fact they elided or erased certain histories that did not fit the goals of authoritarian storytellers. I was very much looking to return to the page stories that people hadn’t told as much. Whether that was the story of civilian women’s resistance to militarization, the story of how Sri Lankan security forces behaved in the theatre of war, or the story of how Tamil militants behaved in the theatre of war, I was interested in messing up the accepted or prevalent narratives.

V.V. Ganeshananthan interviewed by Katy Wimhurst.

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The State of Us: An Interview with Charlie Hill

‘On the International Space Station’ took years to write and I only persevered because I thought it was an original idea; if I’d known there was something else like it, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. It might be convincing because I did a ridiculous amount of research into both the International Space Station and Toronto. Then again, it was supposed to be about a woman. And given you’re the second person out of not very many to think it was a man, I’ve got to consider the possibility it wasn’t my most successful act of ventriloquism!

Katy Wimhurst interviews Charlie Hill.

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Twist: An Interview with Adele Bertei

Our scene in NYC was the very first time women artists from all over — England, Ireland, Germany, France, Japan, America — gathered to make art, music, film, theater, books. There’s never been anything like it in the history of artistic movements, and I’m thrilled to be telling the story.

John Wisnieski interviews Adele Bertei.

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To Battle with the Forces of Nature: An Interview with Derek Ogbourne

Chance would be a fine thing! The spontaneously glorious nature of words and meaning, double meaning, triple meanings, words that sound like other words but mean something completely different, Intense and In Tents — chance is a fine tool to upset the chains of formalism, the random, the unexpected, the free mind, playfulness as flourishes of nature’s wonder of randomness are harnessed by things made by artists. 

Derek Ogbourne interviewed by Steve Finbow.

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Q&A: Nathan Connolly, Dead Ink Books

I think readers are going into it with their eyes open, and the very fact that the book presents them with challenges is maybe part of what is driving the interest in it. It is a difficult book on a difficult subject matter and readers are hungry for that. A book that asks if the human race is even worthy of survival shouldn’t be easy.

Nathan Connolly of Dead Ink Books interviewed by 3:AM’s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.

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Q&A: Richard Porter, Pilot Press

I think there’s a huge surge in the popularity of what is called “queer” literature at the moment, but I think that it is a selective interest, operating within a narrow framework. You only have to take a look at the shelves of an LGBT+ section in a bookshop to see the vibrant colours and attention-grabbing designs, what a friend calls ‘Bubble Tea covers’, to get a feel of what parameters the big publishers are working within. My Dead Book is hardcore. It’s intense and unrelenting in its despair. I can see how it didn’t find an audience at larger presses.

Richard Porter of Pilot Press interviewed by 3:AM’s Fiction Editor, Daniel Davis Wood.

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