[4] Boyd Tonkin, in The Independent, described it as keeping "faith with the old little-review tradition of avant-garde provocation and seditious literary cheek"[5] and Inés Martin Rodrigo, in Spanish daily ABC, likened it to an "Offbeats' New Yorker".

[6] An anthology covering its first five years of publishing, The Edgier Waters, was published in Britain by Snowbooks in June 2006,[7] featuring writers Steve Almond, Bruce Benderson, Michael Bracewell, Tom Bradley, Billy Childish, Steven Hall, Ben Myers, Tim Parks, Mark Simpson, HP Tinker and Kenji Siratori, as well as poetry pieces arranged by Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo alongside Tyondai Braxton.

A volume of city-themed fiction, 3:AM London, Paris, New York, followed in 2008[8] and featured Henry Baum, Chris Cleave, Niven Govinden, Laura Hird, Toby Litt, Lee Rourke, Nicholas Royle, Matt Thorne and Evie Wyld.

[10] In 2014, a book-length collection of 3:AM's popular "End Times" interviews of notable philosophers (as conducted by Richard Marshall) was published by Oxford University Press with a further volume following in 2017.

Both Stuckism and the Medway Poets featured prominently, from Billy Childish, Wolf Howard and Sexton Ming to a column by mainstay Charles Thomson, though to a lesser extent 3:AM also carried pieces supportive of Britart, in particular on Damien Hirst and with Matthew Collings.

There was a further strong musical presence on the site, from an extensive archive by and about punk rockers (including several interviews with members of the Bromley Contingent), through to pieces by and about Spacemen 3 and other shoegazer acts.

Authors interviewed several times include Steve Almond, Will Ashon, Stephen Barber, Childish, Andrei Codrescu, Dennis Cooper, Richard Hell, Stewart Home, Tom Bradley, Wu Ming, Michael Moorcock, Dan Rhodes, Nicholas Royle, Iain Sinclair, Scarlett Thomas, Cathi Unsworth, John King, Helen Walsh, Jon Savage, and Simon Critchley.