Progressive culture since 1954
Clark Ashton Smith’s ‘weird’ short story from 1931, ‘The city of the singing flame’, presents the journals of Gilles Angarth (also a writer of weird fiction) and his accidental discovery of a portal to another dimension near the California-Nevada border – a place of lush vegetation surrounding a strange and cyclopean city.
We’d like to thank the 650 entrants for their impressive work this year. Now, the 2018 judges – Alison Whittaker, Nguyễn Tiên Hoàng and Toby Fitch – have arrived at a shortlist of nine outstanding poems.
This year, the first place prize is $4000 and publication in Overland 235. Two runner-up stories will be awarded $500 each, and will be published online alongside our winter edition.
It also shined a light on the existence of the leftist nerd: a common type of nerd (especially in trans communities) whose presence is continually overshadowed by the louder voices of reactionary gamers and pseudo-rationalist centrists claiming to be apolitical, even as they enthusiastically support the status quo.
But they’re symptomatic of our contempt for the coast. We ‘love’ the beach because of whatever enjoyment we can squeeze out of it (free swims, warmth, Instagram fodder) and godspeed to anything – endangered species, for example – that stands in the way.
Years later, Ana would confide that when she got lifts home, she’d ask her friends to drop her off around the block so no one would know she was houso.
Anatomical naming of the female genitals has historically been imprecise, vague and confused. For example, what the ancient Greeks termed the ‘nymphe’ (for the clitoris) would later be applied to the labia minora by the anatomist Vesalius, who thought that the clitoris was a biological abnormality and not a part of the vulva.
The EAC is just one of many sleeping serpents stirred up by our warming world, a friendly force made unfamiliar. When we talk about climate change, this is its face.
Walk and wait, wait and walk. They only have one purpose on this trip and it’s to reach the United States. Their life, for the time being, centres on migration.
In the era of robo-debt, the social welfare state has been so eviscerated that there is nothing left to strip, so corporate tax cuts must be funded by stealing welfare from the past. Think of it as the Coalition Government’s austerity time machine.
The preamble to the Argentine constitution makes no distinction between Argentines and anyone else, simply stating that its provisions apply to ‘all people who to wish to live on Argentine soil. ’ Additionally, Article 20 states that ‘foreigners in the nation’s territory are entitled to all the civil rights of citizens. ’
It is the eighth anniversary of the earthquakes that devastated Christchurch, and much of the rebuild is now complete. The brash new complexes in the retail core scream ‘progress’, with multiple outlets competing for the high-end clothing dollar, while craft beer bars and gastropubs overlook the Avon River as it meanders through the city. This is Christchurchland, a city that hums with dystopian unease, with new developments that erase not just the history but also the very purpose of the city.
The year is 1982. US President Ronald Reagan is ankle-deep in his first term. Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher will soon be elected Prime Minister of the UK. Everyone’s shaking hands with free market capitalism, neoliberal ideals, and a hostile brand of shark-eyed individualism that will endure for decades to come. Jim Henson is having none of it.
On 4 December 2018, the Australian rare earth mining company Lynas suffered a critical setback to its operations in the Malaysian city of Kuantan. The Malaysian minister of energy, science, technology, environment and climate change declared that the mining giant can no longer operate without a plan to safely dispose of its radioactive waste. The announcement came off the back of more than a decade of grassroots activism against the multinational company.
Koraly Dimitriadis hails from a strict Greek Orthodox migrant background and her work is a consistent and vividly burning ‘fuck you’ to tradition, to repression, and to the idea that we must accept the roles allotted us with strangled fortitude. If Dimitriadis’ narrative contains a recommendation it is that we get the hell out of there, wherever the oppressive there might be, and emerge, phoenix-like, from the ashes.