David Winters, “An Interview with David Winters” by Matthew Jakubowski, truce 21 October 2014

My first book review was of Barthes’ The Preparation of the Novel. I sent it to Andrew Gallix at 3:AM. He published it, and made me an editor shortly afterwards. I’m grateful to Andrew for that. And to Barthes!

… As for “guiding” the magazine, for me the most attractive aspect of 3:AM is its refusal to “stand for” anything! As Andrew often puts it, the site has “no party line”. It was always supposed to be a broad church — or an anarchic ship of fools, to mix the metaphor. The most amusing attacks on us have come from bloggers who treat book reviewing as if it were some sort of moral crusade; who want to divide readers’ tastes into “right” and “wrong”. We find factionalism quite infantile, and upsetting these dogmatists is as good a reason as any to keep publishing.