‘Hi, John, I’m the intern who’s been assigned to fact-check your article. I was hoping you could clarify how you determined that there are thirty-four strip clubs in the city while the source you’re using says thirty-one.’ So says Jim Fingal to John D’Agata in their co-written book, The Lifespan of a Fact, a text ostensibly based on Fingal’s fact-checking of a D’Agata essay on the suicide of a Las Vegas teenager, published in the Believer.
Tomorrow night, join Meanjin, Kill Your Darlings, The Lifted Brow and Overland for a combined launch of thrilling literary activities for 2014! As well as launching their new issue, Overland will launch the new Overland Story Wine Prize! Free wine at the event will be supplied by Story Wines.
For capitalism to work, it is necessary for goods, capital and services to always be moving. For people, on the other hand, to settle often means to achieve security, loosely defined as ‘not having to move again’. In the language of decades of European treaties, therefore, we can see the tension that is being played out now against the backdrop of the ongoing currency crisis and the union’s expansion into less economically advanced regions.
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) changed the way we think about documentary. But, peeling back those fabricated layers, what the film really shows is the falsity of history: a series of stories told by, at best, unreliable narrators, and at worst, ideological tyrants.
Now in its seventh year, the Overland Judith Wright Prize for New and Emerging Poets is one of Australia’s richest poetry awards and the only major competition for poets in the early moments of their creative calling.