3:AM Magazine
There is an energy of purpose and orchestrated vision to 3:AM Magazine that clearly sets it apart from other online literary journals. The introductory homepage banner is sleek, intense, yet appropriately understated in style. The site's color scheme of layered blue for borders and plain white background for each entry section together create a warm consistency of appearance, theme, and design. Though a few textual typos stand out, especially in works of translation, this is forgivable in light of 3:AM's sheer volume of output.
The editors of 3:AM have managed to construct a site that is graceful in its suggestion of innovation. The viewer is eased into discovering two particularly good uses of media, flash fiction and blogging, favorable to an audience often weary of having to read long excerpts on a computer screen.
Flash fiction is an appealing format that enables the writer and reader to engage in an intimate and immediate moment. Take for example Jana Lisboa's "Daddy," a seemingly personal portrait of a daughter struggling to reconcile her father's militaristic and staunchly Catholic parenting skills. Though such an experience can be drawn out at length in the form of a novel, Lisboa's brief, but intense, personal narrative succeeds to effect in the reader a heightened sense of the emotional dynamic that often exists between father and daughter: "It was so. He called and I burst into tears. It was just like that one time, when once he was big, I was tiny." Flash fiction forces the writer to create the leanest, and thus the most emotionally charged sentences.
Perhaps 3:AM Magazine's most notable achievement, in addition to featuring an excellent variety of underground literature, is its concerted effort to publish a wide range of international voices. One such example of 3:AM's dedication to cultural plurality, and again within the genre of flash fiction, is Brazilian born Adriano Queiroz's "The Opportunity" (translated by Maisa Dabus) which depicts the defiance and subversion of a South American septuagenarian against the prevailing attitudes of bias toward the elderly. The manner in which the main character treats old age is revealing and surprising to a western reader. The comparative possibilities of a multi-cultural narrative experience as a movement are now taking full shape, and its nice to see 3:AM participate. It would be welcome if they took this a step further by devoting a specific section to works of contemporary foreign literature. While this topic is hardly new within the circles of academia, only now have such international works been displayed for universal public access.
3:AM's blog roll "Buzzwords Blog" includes a novel mix of multi-media; combining text, YouTube, video excerpts, photography, and an equally diverse fare of quirky and insightful commentary. A February 9, 2009 post titled "The drivel parts, or we'll tell him we're frightened and have to go home" weds humor, a TV sitcom, and literary history as it details an anecdote from the life of writer Richard Yates. What 3:AM accomplishes here is the clever threading of several mediums and genres to convey and expand the discussion topic. This is multi-media at its best; collaborative, focused, and inclusive.
The sections devoted to criticism and interviews are well researched and cover a broad spectrum of artists. Check out the Sophie Erskine interview with Meat Poet Steve Richmond and Mikael Covey's interview with 'Bizzaro' poet and fiction writer Tom Bradley.
When selecting entries for publication, the editors of 3:AM Magazine do not sacrifice quality simply for the opportunity to fill its pages with eclectic works. Those whose artistic products have been published are truly deserving of notice, and this against an international pool of contributions makes 3:AM a pioneer in reaching out to writers of all backgrounds.
