Progressive culture since 1954
I am not ordinarily interested in behind-the-scenes accounts and authorial meta-analyses, and studiously avoid for instance the director’s commentary tracks on DVDs, but lately the convergence of Gilligan’s show-after-the-show, and of the torrent of viewer commentary and critique on the web became an irresistible spectacle, every bit as absorbing as the show proper.
Rebecca Solnit is the Thomas Friedman of America’s liberal Left: a queasily bad writer stuck in a 90s parallel universe who isn’t great with reality but practiced at milking the stretched udder of metaphor. Friedman gave us The World is Flat. Solnit’s new work is The Faraway Nearby.
Overland is seeking fiction from new and emerging writers for a special online edition to be guest edited by writer and long-time Overland fiction reader, SJ Finn. For this special edition, ‘new and emerging’ describes a writer who has not yet published a book of stories or novel with commercial distribution.
Submissions close midnight, Wednesday 16 October.
For something a little different, join Overland editorial intern Eloise Oxer for a short series of author-interview podcasts. To launch our podcast series we talk with writer, poet and performer Maxine Beneba Clarke about everything from winning the 2013 Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an Unpublished Manuscript to juggling the demands of a three-book deal while raising small children.
Australia is a martial and warlike nation, established on beachheads on the east coast of the continent in 1789 by the military might of Britain. Long-running martial conflict with the indigenous people ensued, a conflict that went on into the 1920s and is yet to be incorporated into mainstream tellings of the history of the Australian nation. Australia’s enthusiastic debut as a military nation during the abattoirs of the First World War was not the unprecedented event that the myth makers eulogise.