I can’t drink coffee. Thomas is drinking his black, taking small swallows and then breathing out suddenly as if imbibing shots of something much stronger.

Here’s a quick note to Overland readers about the launch of my first novel, The Danger Game, Thursday August 13 at Trades Hall Bella Union Bar at 6pm. Christos Tsiolkas has been kind enough to do the launch speech, please join me here. Now let’s see if I can add a graphic without breaking the system!

We don’t have quite the room in our print magazine for reviews that we’d like, and I am rather lacklustre when it comes to regular blogging…so I’m going to try and write a weekly post about the books I am getting into. Needless to say these aren’t reviews proper, just the scattered associations of an […]

I was somewhat mystified and appalled by what ‘Dean of Sydney’ had to say about the Gordon Ramsey/Tracy Grimshaw debacle on the Meanjin blog. Unless it’s deadpan irony, too sophisticated for me, the comment was pretty odd.

The Guardian and the Age have both posted footage of police attacking a man who was apparently wandering through the G20 protests in London. Tomlinson died of a heart attack after being struck and thrown to the ground. Unbelieveable!

I just finished a quite extraordinary and very frank essay by Kevin Brophy in the latest issue of the Australian Book Review. In it, Brophy uses the arguments of philosopher Zizek (apologies for the lack of diacritics but WordPress just won’t let it happen) about the nature of violence under capitalism, to frame a personal […]

This week, before things rapidly descended into chaos, I went into Fitzroy Library. For years now, it’s been a habit of mine, to peruse the sorting shelves and discover what others are reading – what they have recently returned, what they have been borrowing. It’s a tiny piece of sociological research (with a laughable sample and […]

Kerryn Goldsworthy makes an interesting observation about the role of gender in the recent Quadrant hoaxing kerfuffle.  The representation of women in literary journals, and how to increase the number of women writing for the magazine, especially writing on politics, has been a subject we’ve returned to year-in, year-out. Women are over-represented in creative writing […]

I finally got around to reading Peter Carey’s His Illegal Self, which I delayed purchasing in its very handsome but also handsomely-priced hardcover edition, but now possess, courtesy of a public library. There are many potential discussions catalysed by the book (the representations of failed utopian enclaves of Australia as embodied in gothic hippie-yet-demonic landscape, […]

Fredric Jameson has suggested that "now it is practical thinking which everywhere represents a capitulation to the system". The imperative to accept the world as it is, to ‘be realistic', to work within existing paradigms and structures, has drowned out the old Situationist call to social dreaming: ‘be reasonable, demand the impossible'.