What you (may have) missed on 3:AM recently:
Poetry: Poetry: In the tenth of his Maintenant series, SJ Fowler interviews the Lithuanian poet Donatas PetroÅ¡ius; ‘Three Poems’ by Donatas PetroÅ¡ius
Fiction: ‘Enlightenment’ by Alan McCormick & Jonny Voss
Non-fiction: In his Japananerica column for 3:AM Asia, Roland Kelts looks at manga on the iPad; Julian Maclaren-Ross is 3:AM‘s Cult Hero
Interviewed: Ben Pleasants presents the John Fante Tapes, part three; Gregory Fry talks to graphic novelist Mike Carey
Reviewed: Karl Whitney on Peter Richardson’s A Bomb in Every Issue: How the Short, Unruly Life of Ramparts Magazine Changed America:
Gonzo and spendthrift it may have been, but Ramparts also found a mass audience. By March 1967, circulation stood at 229,000, and it eventually reached around 300,000. The countercultural magazine was now encroaching on the mainstream, and at least one bastion of American journalism was displeased. An amusing thread in Richardson’s book is his tracing of Time magazine’s strange obsession with its radical counterpart: to a Time journalist writing shortly after Ramparts‘ expos é of the National Student Association’s connections with the CIA, the magazine was ‘the sensation-seeking New Left-leaning monthly’ that hyped up the story.
After Ramparts ran a photo-essay in January 1967 about the effects of the Vietnam War on the civilian population of the country, Time alleged that the magazine had attempted to portray ‘flimflam as fact’, and that the story was ‘a mere juggling of highly dubious statistics and a collection of very touching pictures, some of which could have been taken in any distressed country.’ The Ramparts story directly influenced Dr Martin Luther King to come out forcefully against the war, which underlines the magazine’s importance at the time.
