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Best non-fiction reads 2011

My pick of non-fiction books is, as you would expect, mostly a reflection of my own particular obsessions and interests. However, one of the pleasures of being a regular reviewer of non-fiction books is the discovery of gems you would not otherwise have stumbled across or even thought were your thing.

One such discovery was How to Cause a Scandal: Adventures in Bad Behaviour by Laura Kipnis (Scribe). This book could have been a supremely trashy exercise in schadenfreude were it not for Kipnis’s witty razor-sharp analysis of the unconscious forces that drive those who scandalise and those who feed on these public fiascos. Taking her cue from Freud, Laura Kipnis tackles four case studies – the spurned female astronaut bent on revenge, the judge who created alter-egos to stalk a former lover, the false friend who snitched on Monica Lewinsky and the fibbing memoirist. As she follows the convolutions of these lurid plots, she lays bare the basic psychic ingredients of scandal: the impulse to self-sabotage, the capacity for self-delusion, the revenge imperative, the flimsiness of rationality and the collective hunger for a scapegoat. Her psychoanalytical approach, fascination with human foibles and feel for narrative make Kipnis akin to Janet Malcolm on overdrive. ... read more

Written by Fiona Capp on 16-12-2011, No comments

City Hall as Trojan Horse: lessons from Occupy LA

While protesters in Oakland, Portland, Boston, New York and cities throughout the US faced riot police with tear gas canisters, their comrades in Los Angeles enjoyed a much cosier relationship with the city and its police. From the very beginning, organisers of Occupy LA made a decision to work closely with the city government and the police, through liaisons, in an effort to avoid the kinds of confrontations seen in other cities. As media team organiser Lisa Clapier put it in characteristically New-Agey prose, ‘[We] chose collectively to remain in our integrity and NOT break the law, unless doing so WAS in integrity.’

Though initially gathering in Pershing Square, a large public space near many financial institutions, organisers quickly opted to set up camp in the grassy park surrounding City Hall, just a stone’s throw from LAPD headquarters. The LAPD set up a command post inside City Hall, allowing for easy surveillance of the park and assigned twelve full-time officers to the protest. The activists, for their part, toed the line, dutifully moving their tents to the surrounding sidewalk each night at 10:30, in keeping with park rules. It was, as one sceptic noted, an ‘occupation by permission’. ... read more

Written by Matt Cornell on 16-12-2011, 1 user comment

Favourite fiction 2011

Shorts

David Malouf’s The Complete Short Stories may have been published in 2008 (Vintage) but I’m including it in my favourite Australian fiction picks for 2011 because it’s one of my best literary investments this year. (That and Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, but that book is so far from ‘2011’ and ‘Australian fiction’ that I don’t think I can get away with it.) My favourite Malouf short, ‘Every Breath You Take’, is the title piece from one of his earlier collections. I’ve been back to the story a few times to try and sort out the uncomfortable feeling that Malouf is reading me and not the other way around. How does a seventy-something man know anything about my disintegration during that love affair? The Complete Short Stories is a slow feast of pretty-close-to-perfect craft by a master. ... read more

Written by Sarah Drummond on 15-12-2011, 2 user comments

Lessons from the age of riots and revolution

An interview with Brad Nguyen

Brad Nguyen is the co-editor of Screen Machine, an online magazine on film, media and cultural criticism. He studied Cinema Studies at the University of Melbourne and has done film reviewing for Triple R Breakfasters. He chats with us about his essay ‘Morality Begone!’, which is featured in the latest edition of Overland.

In your essay you write that by framing outbreaks of social violence – one example being the London riots – in moral terms, ‘the true political dimension is obliterated’. Could you please describe what you mean by this? ... read more

Written by Editorial team on 15-12-2011, 1 user comment

Top Ten Poetic Moments of 2011

The following is a list of my ten favourite moments in Australian poetry in the past year or so. I call it a list of moments because not all of these are poems; a few of them are discussions of poetry which I enjoyed for various reasons.

In a recent entry on my own blog entitled ‘Some Thoughts’ I made a few points about my sometimes awkward relationship with contemporary Australian poetry. I will refrain from quoting myself here but I will preface the following list by admitting that if permitted I would spend all my time reading books by my favourite poets and authors, almost all of whom are international and dead.

However, I will also admit that on occasion it proves a blessing to be forced to delve into contemporary Australian poetry and the following is a list of ten things that failed to make me wish I was born in another time and place: ... read more

Written by Tara Mokhtari on 14-12-2011, 3 user comments

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, 10 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