The Edgier Waters: 3:AM Magazine Anthology

Last week a copy of 3:AM Magazine’s The Edgier Waters anthology arrived here in Bangkok (thanks Andrew!) - while I’ve yet to read the majority of this book, I’ve certainly being doing a lot of fondling of it. SnowBooks did a great job of packaging the book so that’s a very attractive volume. There is something great about seeing all these writers and articles that have previously been strung together on the Web brought together in a real, professionally put together book - it almost reinvents the words of these articles for me, many of which I’ve read online already - perhaps because the book lets you move around between the items much easier (by simple expediency of flicking through the pages) and simultaneously makes it a lot easier to sink into each piece and spend time in it. On the Web, most people, including me, are in information-gathering mode - I find it extremely hard to sit and read an article online with any real attention - I scan it and move on. But the same articles on paper are much easier to spend time over. There’s the likes of Billy Childish, Thurston Moore, Travis Jeppesen, Michael Bracewell, Steve Almond, James Allis, Mike Watt and Tony O’ Neill in here, but names are almost irrelevant. Having 3:AM on the front cover means everything in the book is worth your attention, whoever wrote it.

I’m still working on Spike’s own anthology (more about that tomorrow) and The Edgier Waters is a real inspiration on how well it can work. It also makes me think it would be great to see anthologies from ReadySteadyBook, Scarecrow and a host of other UK lit sites in the future - if paper gives this stuff more permanence, it also acts as a useful retrospective of great writing to be found on all these sites.