Return to reading
Goodreads is about comparison, for better or worse. How many books have you read compared to your friends, your co-workers, your best mate’s mum? What did you think of this book, or that one? The...
View ArticleClimate change was so last year: writers’ festivals and the great derangement
Nevertheless – contrary to Overington’s sneering claim that at literary festivals it’s ‘panel after panel on climate change’ – I was initially struck by the dearth of discussion on the subject at this...
View ArticleA mythopoetic reading of Tony Birch’s Ghost River
What I want to do in this essay is to offer a suggestive and perhaps even a provocative reading of Tony Birch’s Ghost River. The post A mythopoetic reading of Tony Birch’s <em>Ghost...
View ArticleCallout: ongoing fiction, poetry and nonfiction readers
Overland is looking to expand its team of fiction and poetry readers, and to start a team of nonfiction readers. These volunteer positions only require a time commitment of a few hours per month. The...
View ArticleWhere is the radical queer imagination? On Going Postal
Collective outrage was growing in August 2017, when Australia’s mandatory detention regime killed another asylum seeker, Hamed Shamshiripour, on Manus Island. As argued by Maddee Clark at Deakin’s...
View ArticleWhat our readers, contributors & editors loved (or didn’t love) in 2018
We asked Overland contributors, volunteers, staff and editors to share their highs and lows of 2018. The post What our readers, contributors & editors loved (or didn’t love) in 2018 appeared first...
View ArticleTelling the untold stories: Alexis Wright on censorship
A world without stories. What would this world look like? Would we become even greater strangers to each other? How would I know who you are or how you felt, or what you thought, or what it is like to...
View ArticleHow reading and writing erotica could revolutionise sexual ethics for women
What drives my work now, and what I think is a big question for us post-#MeToo, is the potential for erotica and sex-fiction writing and reading to play a part in creating a non-fiction world, or a new...
View ArticleJuly in fiction
As wild and genre-bending and hellacious as her prose is, though, Emanuel’s novel can be placed alongside things we have read: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s body of work, and, more locally,...
View ArticleAnd the winner isn’t: on the inherent stupidity of literary prizes
We're now about 40 years into the period where literary prizes have become the dominant means of literary taste-making, and they are basically terrible at it. Does anyone really believe that the winner...
View ArticleAugust in nonfiction
Growing Up Queer in Australia gifts us stories from fifty-three LGBTIQA+ people. And they are gifts: each contributor writes of themselves and their experiences with deep generosity. There are stories...
View ArticleI link, therefore I am
Various arguments have been made to explain hypertext fiction’s lack of mainstream success: that hypertext narratives impose impossible cognitive demands on readers; that the inability to establish...
View ArticleCrushing and reading Socialist Realism
Crushes are often reduced to a matter of personal infatuation, but slowly I begin to realise that I have a crush on this book. The post Crushing and reading <em>Socialist Realism</em>...
View ArticleYour teenage reading will haunt you forever
Years after reading Flowers in the Attic, dark wardrobes and creaky houses and simmering men and thwarted women still lurk in my imagination. The book took lodging in my brain at a critical point,...
View ArticleWhich One Are You?
I had to innovate. I had to create a game that put the onus of invention and self-revelation back onto the players. And this is how I came up with my piece de resistance, my submission to the games...
View ArticleOpen letter: Statement of solidarity with Palestine and call to action from...
We, the students, staff, and alumni who make up the community at The University of Melbourne, reiterate the NTEU University of Melbourne Branch’s Palestine solidarity statement. We implore The...
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