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A gobsmacker of a book

The Cook
Wayne Macauley
Text Publishing

The Cook is a gobsmacker of a book.

Written by the much-lauded Australian writer Wayne Macauley, The Cook’s themes of capitalism-gone-mad, excessive consumption, untrammelled growth and rampant exploitation of humans, animals and natural resources is timely.

Macauley explores a number of issues recently highlighted by the Occupy Movement, animal welfare groups and the GFC through his main protagonist Zac, one of a number of young offenders sent to Cook School to learn a trade and become decent, upstanding and productive citizens. ... read more

Written by Trish Bolton on 14-12-2011, 7 user comments

AS Patric’s ‘The Rattler and Other Stories’

The Rattler and Other Stories
AS Patric
Spineless Wonders

Do you know the screensaver that comes standard with windows called Mystify? It looks like a kaleidoscope of string art, with lines from one shape flowing in and out of the preceding and following patterns; it can be quite mesmerising to watch. I got the same sense reading AS Patric’s The Rattler & other stories, each story is standalone brilliant, but together they flow and mystify the reader. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 13-12-2011, 8 user comments

Dispatch from our intern

From a first-hand account of what it is like to be imprisoned inside Guantánamo Bay to our enduring affection for bookshops, here is my pick of some of the most interesting links from around the web.

Jay Rosen has teamed up with the Guardian to provide alternative coverage of the 2012 US Presidential campaign. The aim is to articulate the ‘citizens agenda’ by making election coverage more relevant to voters’ needs and concerns.

Mohammed el Gharani, the youngest prisoner to be sent to Guantánamo Bay – he was arrested at 14 – has written a personal account of his imprisonment in Guantánamo for the London Review of Books.

Crikey has posted a video of Barbara Walters interviewing Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Walters poses some fairly tough questions to Assad, but for the President accusations of state brutality are ‘false allegations and distortions of reality’ and he denies killing his citizens – something, he insists, only a ‘crazy’ leader would do. UN Security General Ban Ki-moon, however, says otherwise.

... read more

Written by Roselina Press on 13-12-2011, No comments

Kim Westwood and the implacable Other

A review of The Courier’s New Bicycle

Kim Westwood’s passion for the repressed, both animal and human, provides her second novel, The Courier’s New Bicycle, with its raison d’étre and much of its energy. She champions the ‘other’ – those groups who have historically been voiceless or politically powerless. Her characters, both human and animal (especially a very cute, fluorescent purple cat, Nitro) each stand as testament to the value of the ‘different’ – and in the world ruled by the fundamentalist Nation First party (no great leap to see a blend of One Nation and Australia First in that name), that means just about everybody who’s not heterosexual and religious. ... read more

Written by Peter Hickman on 12-12-2011, No comments

Something rotten at the heart of Sydney University

Something is rotten at the heart of Sydney University. On the surface, it has never shown so attractive a face to the world. In the evening, walking back towards City Road, the glass and steel of the newly-finished law building frame the sloping green of Victoria Park, and beyond that, the lights of the city. The sight has the dimensions and composition of a picture-postcard: serene, iconic, a little too neat. Continue on, and you will find that the bridge to cross City Road, which is also brand-new. Which seems a little strange … wasn’t there a perfectly functional old bridge there a couple of years ago? ... read more

Written by Joshua Mostafa on 12-12-2011, 3 user comments

On Breivik and Europe’s far right

An interview with Mattias Gardell

Mattias Gardell is professor of comparative religion at Uppsala University, Sweden. His research focuses on the interaction between religion and politics, and is the author of a number of publications including In the Name of Elijah Muhammad and Gods of the Blood. Following the terrorist attacks that occurred in Norway on 22 July, Mattias has focused much of his current research on the militant anti-Muslim environment that produced Anders Breivik Behring. We spoke to Mattias about his article, ‘Terror in the Norwegian woods’, which is featured in the latest edition of Overland. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 9-12-2011, No comments

Award Winning Australian Writing 2011

Award Winning Australian Writing 2011
Adolfo Aranjuez (ed)
Melbourne Books

I still remember when I won my first literary competition. It was 1998 and I was a second-year creative writing student. My tutor that year had urged us to start sending our work out, had counselled us that we would likely fail more than we would succeed but if we really wanted to be writers we must persist. I remember him holding up a sheaf of papers, a catalogue of his rejections, and feeling heartened. I don’t recall how many competitions I entered before I won my first, but I don’t think it was many. What I do recall is the thrill of that win. The validation I felt. Somebody thought my words mattered. To confirm this there was an award ceremony, a trophy, a modest cheque, publication in an anthology, and an article in the local paper. It was all rather dizzying. I didn’t realise at the time that most competitions offer little reward. A certificate to be filed away and a few hundred dollars to be banked, but rarely publication. Which is why this anthology is such a gem. ... read more

Written by Irma Gold on 8-12-2011, 7 user comments

Embrace the renewables revolution

An interview with Xavier Rizos

Xavier Rizos researches relationships between economics, governance, regulation, politics and culture. We spoke to him about his article ‘Will the market save us?’ which is featured in the new Overland, and why it will take more than a ‘carbon tax’ for Australia to have an effective climate policy.

What motivated you to write this article now? Do you find that there is still much confusion around what the government’s carbon package actually involves? ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 8-12-2011, 2 user comments

My first year as Overland fiction editor

A new issue of Overland (205) is out this week and marks the end of my first year as its fiction editor. So I thought it would be a good moment to reflect on this year of fiction, especially in light of the debates last year about the possibility of ‘politically engaged fiction’, which I said was the sort of fiction I was hoping to publish in Overland.

At the time I made it clear that by this phrase I didn’t mean social realism. I gave a few examples of the sort of fiction I did mean, including Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Zamyatin’s We, The Master and Margarita, 100 Years of Solitude, Brave New World, 1984. Other examples that spring to mind are Animal Farm, Catch-22, Vonnegut Jr’s Slaughterhouse-5 and Player Piano, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow, Christos Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. These are among my all-time favourite novels. I think of them as ‘politically engaged fiction’. ... read more

Written by Jane Gleeson-White on 7-12-2011, 12 user comments

Review: ‘The Unforgiving Rope’

The Unforgiving Rope: Murder and Hanging on Australia’s Western Frontier
Simon Adams
UWAP

Have you got one of those relatives, the kind who insists that the answer to all the world’s problems is to bring back hanging? You know who I mean. They usually live in a fantasy land called the Good Old Days. Yes? Well, I have just the Christmas present for them.

Simon Adams’ study of hanging in WA from 1844 until 1909 does not come to any shocking conclusions. From the first establishment of the Swan River Colony, Indigenous people and ethnic minorities felt the noose tighten more often than white, Anglo settlers. The book walks through and around the stories of executed Aborigines – who could still be hanged publicly long after the spectacle had been abolished for any other criminal – convicts and Irish Catholics, Chinese, Japanese, Afghans and bad mothers. It is not a simple catalogue of the dead. Adams zooms in and out to give us the wider cultural, legal and historical picture in addition to the specifics of each chosen case. Technological advances in the execution process and changing views on the public display of the execution are discussed. He has also travelled to the crime scenes and pored over the archives. ... read more

Written by Rhona Hammond on 6-12-2011, 3 user comments

Meanland: Editors, trolls and lovers

Gwen Harwood’s sentiment about editors – eloquently expressed in an acrostic, has become Australian folklore. While some authors would agree with Gwen, for others it’s not as simple. Nor is it always obvious in this blogging, tweeting, forever-online world, who our ultimate editor might be.

In many areas the editor-author partnership remains unchanged. Editors and publishers work with authors the way they always have: commissioning, editing and publishing work. At the other end of the spectrum is self-publishing including web pages, blogs, twitter etc

Written by Catherine Moffat on 5-12-2011, 3 user comments

A reply to CIS on the Intervention

intervention_protest

At first I didn’t think it was worthwhile responding to Sara Hudson’s response to me on the Intervention. I thought it was pretty insubstantial, and its ad hominem tone seemed to me suggestive that replying would reduce the issues to one of personalities, rather than the issues. However, I then decided that some comments may help illuminate the issues to outside parties.

So, let us review the state of debate. In April, I wrote:

The mountain of evidence of the failures of the NT Intervention defies summary here. Suffice to say, there is literally no evidence, even in government reports, that it has helped improve the socio-economic conditions Intervention supporters claim to be concerned about. Its supporters are simply backing racist policies because they believe racism is the best way to deal with Indigenous communities.

... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 2-12-2011, 2 user comments

Inside the mind of Jane Gleeson-White

Recently, we sat down with Overland fiction editor, Jane Gleeson-White, to pick her brain about her latest book, Double Entry.

Double entryQ: Overland readers know you as a fiction editor. Most literary types avoid both maths and economics like the devil does holy water. How did you develop and maintain such a diversity of interests?

A: I’ve always had wide-ranging interests and I think most literary types do, but perhaps my passion for maths and economics is less common (although I know others with similar interests). I’ve secretly loved maths and economics since I first met them at school, but my first love was always literature. After studying literature at university, I gave into the lure of economics and did an economics degree, studying maths-based economics and political economy. As for how I maintain my interests: by reading. I’m always reading. ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 1-12-2011, 1 user comment