Overland literary journal

My journey to Overland: the politics subject I never took

Six years ago I saw Overland for the first time on a bookshelf in Readings. ‘Progressive culture’ were the refreshing words that stood out, a vast contrast to the words ‘shareholder value’ being hammered into me as a corporate drone programmer.

Yes, that’s right everyone, I was once one of ‘them’ [evil cackle].

It was the closest I had been to literature in the nine years since I graduated high school. My reading had been reduced from Shakespeare and Jane Austen to mind-numbing textbooks like ‘Java Programming Advanced concepts’. I was starving for literature. I don’t recall any of the articles I flicked through on that day in Readings, but I remember being surprised by the content – it was full of my Dad’s radical theories, theories I found interesting but dismissed as conspiracy. After all, the Herald Sun or The Age never published articles even remotely close to his views. But here was an entire journal dedicated to Dad – very strange. There was even a word for it: The Left. ... read more

Written by Koraly Dimitriadis on 2-12-2009, 10 user comments

never mind the bollocks, here’s Subscriberthon

Overland founder Stephen Murray-Smith ended the magazine's association with the Communist Party in 1958, but it remains the most overtly political of the Australian literary magazines [...] Perhaps ironically, the result is one of the least doctrinaire and liveliest of the Australian literary magazines. Under editor Jeff Sparrow, Overland has published nonfiction by writers ranging from Christos Tsiolkas to Guy Rundle and Bob Ellis, as well as new fiction by then-unknowns Nam Le and Kalinda Ashton (who is also an associate editor of the magazine). Alongside these it has commissioned essays by the likes of Mark Davis and Germaine Greer, and continues to run an important lecture series and other public events. Yet despite the standard (and indeed stature) of its many contributors, the magazine is distinguished by its deliberately oppositional and punkish edge, qualities that not only give its contributions an urgency more august publications often lack but also a sense of connection with the contemporary incarnations of the radical politics that were its genesis. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 2-12-2009, 3 user comments

Subliminal Message

Written by Maxine Clarke on 2-12-2009, 2 user comments

everyone’s a winner to us!

Subs have been rolling in all morning. But we have sufficient prizes that your chances of winning something are very, very good. So subscribe now -- and, with luck, karma will manifest itself instantly in the form of a prize.

(Note: prizes may not actually contain karma.)

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 2-12-2009, 1 user comment

Cobain and Kennedy

Gus Hughes smiles when he arrives and says hello, goes to the counter to get something to eat, returns with a roll-up and some chips, sits down and smiles again, saying he was hoping for something else, but it would do.

“So what are you up to?” he asks, indicating the paper and my notes for a story called The Acquired Taste of Poison. I tell him about how I began waking up at about 4am, though I kept myself in bed until after 6. And how I’d just watched a bit of a doco on Kurt Cobain that I've been dipping into over the last few weeks. A strange biography called About a Son. Strange because thus far, in an hour of film, they haven't shown his face, there are no talking-heads, and the images are all impressionistic visuals of life lived in the places Kurt is referencing in a long, meandering audio interview. It's elegiac, because Kurt's suicide acts retroactively all the way through it, but it's also kind of boring and out of focus. I'm enjoying watching ten or fifteen minutes of it every now and again. ... read more

Written by Alec Patric on 2-12-2009, No comments

Welcome to Subscriberthon 2009

Welcome to our new website – and welcome to the Overland Subscriberthon 2009.Between now and 8 December, we'll be calling on anyone and everyone in the orbit of Overland to make a small contribution to the journal's ongoing health.

In this era of digital databases, most people can, with a little ingenuity, access most publications pretty freely. In other words, even if we wanted to, we can't force anyone to subscribe. In any case, we think the articles published in Overland deserve the widest possible circulation, which is why we make them all available online. ... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 1-12-2009, 2 user comments

our cup overfloweth

Thanks to everyone who braved the elements for the Overland-Meanjin end of year function and bowling contest. We are pleased to report that the emu egg cup has now been reclaimed by its rightful owners.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 30-11-2009, 4 user comments

talk on killing

Courtesy Anthony Snowden and the good folk at Engage media, here's a little vid of me talking with Seb Prowse at New International Books about my book Killing.

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 30-11-2009, 4 user comments