Buzzwords

At the outset, a taxi accidentally exits a car park through the entrance, thereby producing a remainder — “a surplus piece of paper” — in the shape of a ticket that preserves its potentiality by remaining in abeyance: “the unsurrendered ticket, paper scrap that had purloined itself, slipped through the architecture of the system it was meant to serve”. There are other similar intervals — interregna — in the novel where the order of things is subtly subverted.

Andrew Gallix on The Rhyl Poster by Tom McCarthy.

Tom McCarthy presents “Returns (on Bachmann)”, a performance-lecture delivered at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York on 21 April 2026. McCarthy argues that Bachmann should be understood not only as one of the major voices of postwar European literature, but also as a vital model for artistic and social practices concerned with memory, recurrence, and unresolved histories.Drawing on philosophical, historical, and psychoanalytic conceptions of return, McCarthy examines the recurring patterns that shape Bachmann’s literary project. Bringing her work into dialogue with Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Sigmund Freud, he explores how repetition, memory, and trauma operate within her writing and across a broader cultural landscape that includes figures such as James Joyce, Stéphane Mallarmé, David Lynch, and Stanley Kubrick.

The Hinge of a Metaphor: A Collection of Essays on Cinema, edited by Richard Skinner, can now be ordered from Vanguard Editions. It includes essays by Victoria Best, David Collard, Dan Dalton, 3:AM Magazine‘s Andrew Gallix, Jonathan Gibbs, Susana Medina, Mathilde Merouani, Rachael de Moravia, Dan O’Brien, Christian Patracchini, Imogen Reid, Richard Skinner, Matthew Turner, Owen Vince, Tony White and Eley Williams. A unique collection of essays on the world of cinema, its films, actors and directors, by a spectacular array of poets, playwrights, essayists, interdisciplinary writers, novelists and academics. Includes new, exclusive work on subjects as diverse as fairy

It’s Thursday night, it’s seven o’clock, it’s Goth of the Pops! Cathi Unsworth talks all things Goth in the time of Thatcher with Andrew Stevens, ahead of her Season of the Witch: The Book of Goth, out May 11 (Nine Eight Books). 3:AM: Patricia Morrison just owns this, sometimes I barely even notice Andrew Eldritch.  LA glamour dropped into Leeds, the epicentre of Goth. CU: Interesting that you start the Sisters strand here, with Eldritch and Pats Morrison after the fatal Sisters schism of 1985. Talking to David Peace for the book about his teenage Goth activities, he remembered seeing

On Friday 7 April, at 7 PM, in a brownstone garden, 1239 will host a clutch of 3:AM Magazine writers, who will present what they please.

Jackson Arn
Zach Issenberg
Harris Lahti
Tom Laplaige
Christopher Urban

Basic spirits provided; communal contributions welcome. Things may go late.

For the street address in Brooklyn, write to mark.desilva@protonmail.com or message @MarkdeSilva1 on twitter. Asking around may also work.

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Part novel, part memoir, it is one of the best books exploring grief that I’ve ever read. It’s cerebral, lyrical, innovative, playful, moving and odd. It digresses from the central theme — the death of Paul’s brother, Mark, who committed suicide in 2015 — to strange and beautiful ruminations on the naming of regions of the sea to medieval graffiti to ancient horses carved into chalk hillsides.

Pictures from the Paul Stanbridge event at Foyles Charing Cross in London by Andrew Gallix. The above text is by Sam Mills, who hosted the event.

For the month of May, 3:AM Magazine will be open for fiction submissions that are 1,000 to 5,000 words in length, double-spaced, and in .doc format (no PDFs). For qualitative guidance, consider our fiction archive. Send your work to mark.desub@gmail.com with a brief note in the body of your email about your writing history. If we are interested in publishing your story, you will hear from us.   Mark de Silva Fiction Editor

For the month of November, 3:AM Magazine will be open for fiction submissions that are 1,000 to 5,000 words in length, double-spaced, and in .doc format (no PDFs). For qualitative guidance, consider our fiction archive. Send your work to mark.desub@gmail.com with a brief note in the body of your email about your writing history. If we are interested in publishing your story, you will hear from us.   Mark de Silva Fiction Editor

3:AMers Mark de Silva, Nick Rombes, and Jeff Wood will engage in a wide-ranging exploration of Points of Attack, the new essay collection from de Silva that picks through the hodgepodge of contemporary culture—its mores, technologies, self-image, and forms of engagement—with an arch, philosophical eye. The event, which will be held on Zoom at 6pm (EST) on Wednesday, February 3rd, will be hosted by Leza Cantoral, editor in chief of the book’s publisher, Clash Books. Do come!