Progressive culture since 1954
But what the collection also reveals is the high level of craftsmanship and dexterity present in Australian writing today. Varied, affecting, and always containing some unexpected twist, many of these stories explore dark subject matter without being overwhelmed by it.
Sam Wallman on religion versus equality in public schools.
Overland magazine and the Malcolm Robertson Foundation are very pleased to announce the winners of the 2015 Judith Wright Poetry Prize.
Let me tell you what it is like to write about domestic violence as an academic.
Given the public/private crossovers all our lives have become online, it’s hard for people to find the boundaries these days between personality and brand; between what’s appropriate and fun and what’s being a needy whiner. ‘Look at me! Look at me!’ some people’s feeds seem to scream, like a megaphone strapped to a fencepost outside a shop, playing the same promotional copy on a loop. We can get used to it, or we can try to rise above the fate of human clickbait.
Last month I received a legal letter accusing me of defamation. Someone who was very close to me for many years – but now is not – had read a piece of short fiction I had published and decided a minor character was about them. Like every writer ever born, I have gleaned sentences, character traits and events, and I’ve hodgepodged it all together to try and convey an emotional truth. It’s what we do, right? Never once had I considered defamation.
Other than penning some columns for L’Espresso, as he had been doing on a weekly or fortnightly basis for over thirty years, and releasing one more novel, Year Zero, his final public act was to found a new publishing house. He and his collaborators called it the ‘ship of Theseus’, after the vessel that produced the ancient paradox by the same name – could an object still be considered the same object if you replaced all of its parts with identical ones? – and set its course to collide with ‘Mondazzoli’, the corporate behemoth created by the merger of the two largest Italian publishers, Mondadori and Rizzoli.
Baby Asha’s imminent deportation has been halted, but the struggle is far from over. What are the politics, potentials and pitfalls of Let Them Stay? How could we go from this moment – which is but one in a long history of opposition to the actions of Australia’s Immigration Department – to a broader dismantling of Australia’s racist border regime?
As a writing genre loosely linked to the evolution of opinion editorial, confessional writing offers as much convenience for readers, writers and publishers as it does problems.
It’s cheap for publishers, who don’t have to cultivate writers but do have to boost their audiences. If they pay anything at all, even above a small token, they can still evade per-word rates or full-time employment costs by offering flat fees.
The recent death of Polish director Andrzej Żuławski might at first appear a lesser addition to 2016’s already dramatic body count of influential artists: Lemmy, Bowie, Rivette, Eco, and Harper Lee, to name but a high-profile few. But in the film world, Żuławski’s passing seemed to come from out of nowhere.
Think about your own life. What would you do if the full-time working week was reduced to 30 hours?
About the position: The Overland publicity officer will work primarily with the editorial team to assist in promoting Overland’s ongoing program of events, including print editions, the online magazine, special editions, events, launches, competitions and the annual Subscriberthon.
Overland contributors and editors with brief recommendations of books, films, arts and culture that deserve a wider audience.
This elision between queers and paedophiles is an old trick for homophobes looking to whip up a little hysteria – one that goes back to Anita Bryant’s 1977 Save Our Children campaign – but refreshingly enough, it seems that most Australians are not buying it this time. Instead, a new narrative of queerness and childhood is emerging. Instead of the (asexual, presumably straight) child at risk from predatory queerness, this new narrative casts the queer child at risk from callous homophobia.