3QR: The Three Quarter Review

One of 3QR’s most popular and magical writers was Diane Sward Rapaport, who passed away just weeks before the pandemic struck. In her last days, she spoke with humor and hope about this next trip into further galaxies. And she knew more than most anyone about being connected to stars and celestial trajectories. She was […]

We at The Three Quarter Review want to thank you for reading the work published via our quirky project featuring three-quarter true story telling, launched back in 2012. And, due to pandemic challenges, to let you know about our print anthology now set for release in 2023, 3QTrue. Our groundbreaking online journal, 3QR, has been […]

(“Poor Robin! Poor Robin Crusoe!” – the parrot in Defoe’s ROBINSON CRUSOE) When I read, much later, That the father of ROBINSON CRUSOE Died in Ropemaker’s Alley, hiding from creditors, I cried. I cried like the girl I was, at 8, who first met Robinson, And my heart leapt into my throat — No! I […]

Lately I’ve been getting dirty looks from people. Not just young people, though they are the worst offenders. Middle-aged people also shoot me dirty looks, and old people assume expressions of mild disgust. I wonder if it’s because I am a middle-aged white man. We’re disliked by many people these days, including members of our […]

The Milky Way galaxy is estimated to contain 100-400 billion stars, the oldest of which are nearly as old as the universe itself. Half of the stars in our galaxy average 6.3 billion, with our sun checking in at 4.8 billion years old. An estimated 10 trillion galaxies populate the universe. Assuming an average of 100 billion […]

I was skimming through the newspaper when I inadvertently glimpsed the fundamental nature of the universe—a glimpse of which physicists (and artists and poets) have been searching, and mostly missing, for millennia. I guess I was just in the right place at the right time. “To my mind,” wrote the noted physicist John Archibald Wheeler, […]

The new releases at Rasputin’s Records were directly to the left of the checkout line. That’s where I first saw Art Pepper staring out from the cover of a Blue Note twofer.  With those haunted eyes and sunken cheeks, he had the refried look of the nasty habit. Friends of ours back home had that […]

Imagine a huge thermometer, we are pretty close to the bottom not as low as Jupiter or Neptune bluest of the blue, but a little higher, between water freezes and water boils closer to freezes, on that imaginary glass device with Fahrenheit on one side going up the thermometer past lead melts is Mercury, brighter […]

  When The Music Stops Call it what you want. Cakewalk, musical chairs, last man standing. I was a master of it. Walk, walk, walk, wait for the needle on the scratchy 45 to stop crackling out the music, walk, walk, walk, THERE! Slide into a seat and bump some poor, slow, schmuck with bad […]

  I’ve always wanted fireworks to be more than they are. So a sphere, why not a tree, with branches cutting high into the night? So a cascade of stars, why not a writhing serpent? So a burning sapphire ball, why not a volcano, rupturing? The industry has names for its effects: ring palm crossette […]

LIBERO IL PASSO: FREE TO STEP OR PASS Consider, for a moment, the concept of the Three Quarter True Story: No censorship for writers. No betrayal for readers. No locked doors with mixed messages. When teaching fiction and nonfiction to university students, I’ve found that the question invariably comes up: What is True? We discuss […]