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Brull’s bookshelf

I’m not a Christian, so I didn’t think of doing this earlier and saying ‘go and get these for Christmas for your pinko friends’. But the end of the year is as good a time as any. So, I thought I’d recommend some books.

I just read it, so this one’s first: Bleeding Afghanistan, by James Ingalls and Sonali Kolhatkar. I think leftists should understand the wars we should be opposing now. This book is five years old, but is very, very good. It looks at the history of Afghanistan; it rightly situates Hamid Karzai as the Western puppet he is, talks about the Islamist warlords we’ve supported, the Islamist theocracy we’ve created and the role of Zalmay Khalilzad. There have been developments since then and greater documentation. But in a pretty brief book, it’s very well reported, hits all the right notes and sets out the contours for understanding our occupation of Afghanistan. I do not necessarily agree with all of its recommendations – it is rather equivocal about ending the occupation. Specifically, the authors say public opinion in Afghanistan at the time was supportive of the occupation continuing. They therefore recommend ending the occupation when the country is safer and warlords are disarmed (or something like that). I think the former condition is the kind of condition Cheney would support – so that they could justify occupation for the next 20 years. The other recommendations are more reasonable. Considering recommendations only take up a few pages, I would not want my reservations on this score to detract from what I consider an excellent and important book, which is the one book above all I would think should be read by activists against this war. People should not just talk about bombing of civilians in Afghanistan – they need to understand more, and this book sets it out clearly and carefully. ... read more

Written by Michael Brull on 30-12-2011, 2 user comments

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

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

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

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

‘That’s what I love about the short form’

Irma GoldAuthor of several children’s books and currently at work on a debut novel, the stories of writer and editor Irma Gold have been published in such notables as Meanjin, Island and Going Down Swinging and she is, of course, a blogger here at Overland. Her debut collection of short fiction, Two Steps Forward is the final piece to the most excellent puzzle that is the Long Story Shorts series published by Affirm Press. Today, Gold chats with us about her process and what she’s up to now. ... read more

Written by Clare Strahan on 29-11-2011, 4 user comments

A conversation with Anna Funder

Anna Funder 2Anna Funder is an internationally acclaimed bestselling Australian author whose debut Stasiland recounted the personal stories of people who worked for the East German secret police, and those whose lives were affected and even destroyed by their covert activities. The book won a swag of international prizes. The manuscript of her follow-up first novel, All That I Am, created a sensation at the 2010 Frankfurt Book Fair and will be published in sixteen countries; it premiered in Australia in September. The novel derives from real events in the lives of activists, intellectuals and artists in pre-WW2 Germany. All That I Am begins: ... read more

Written by Boris Kelly on 24-11-2011, No comments

Universities in ruins

etonboys1936Peter Cook once said that nobody had actually read Don Quixote, and though Cervantes might have written it, even he couldn’t be bothered reading it as well. When I heard Cook say this, it relieved me of a great responsibility, that of reading Don Quixote. These days I try never to read any book that weighs more than a brick, but it’s very easy to fill one’s own bookshelves with books that should be read, rather than books that one wants to read and might enjoy.

I still haven’t read Don Quixote, and don’t own a copy so I’m never tempted to try. Gathering a library of books together can be a bit like creating a new family. Biological families, as most of us have hopefully found out, just aren’t enough. Putting together a family of choice that doesn’t in some way replicate the family of origin can be tricky. You can end up accidentally marrying one of your parents (‘You’re just like my mother!’) or squabbling with friends over a variety of objects you’re highly attached to in the same way you used to argue with your brother over who got the GI Joe and who got the Action Man. In the same way we can end up with libraries of books that we hump around for all kinds of reasons other than we enjoy them. ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 16-11-2011, 36 user comments

Meanland: The death of the book, and other utopian fantasies

Well, it’s official: the (printed) book is dead, long live the (e)book.

Or so many political and cultural elites would like us to believe. On the very day of my writing this blog, for example, we were subjected to federal Minister for Small Business Nick Sherry’s apocalyptic diagnosis that Australian booksellers will be annihilated within the next five years, thanks, in part, to the (supposed) explosion of online sales of ebooks. In a less dramatic and more considered register, Kate Eltham, CEO of Queensland Writers Centre, pontificated on the ABC television’s Jennifer Byrne Presents, that the advent of ebooks and e-readers was disrupting ‘the underpinning supply chains that are currently supporting modern publishing’. ... read more

Written by Ali Alizadeh on 29-06-2011, 7 user comments

Winning Meanland essay 2: The internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest

For the ten minutes before my children sleep the internet has not impacted upon my reading habits in the slightest. Tonight’s book is a treasure. Behind its thick crème cover, its pages, also crème, are stiff and square with sixties-vintage pictures. Chapter One, Down the Rabbit-Hole, begins on page eleven.

Alice‘Why not page one?’ a son asks.
‘If you flick through and count,’ I say, ‘it’s page eleven.’

But he’s forgotten what I’ve said, absorbed in the blurred edges of Alice’s golden hair once painted with watercolours or pastels.

We tried ebooks over the summer (kindle on iPhone). The pictures were ordinary, the numberlessness was disorientating and the text too small on that piddly screen. It was decided. For the nightly family read, we will stick with tradition. ... read more

Written by Diane Simonelli on 22-06-2011, 15 user comments

Waltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer

'Waltzing with Jack Dancer' coverWaltzing with Jack Dancer: a slow dance with cancer
Poems by Geoff Goodfellow
Story by Grace Goodfellow
Wakefield Press

This review is dedicated to Guido Schivella, who lost to cancer in 2008, and to Charisse Mitchell, who will beat cancer in 2011.


Cancer is indiscriminate, picking its battles with seeming randomness. There are hypothesised causes: smoking, drinking, sun etc, but they are not definitive. Cancer picked the wrong fight when it tried to take on Geoff Goodfellow, the man HG Nelson describes as ‘tough nut’. Geoff’s boxing training, working-class background and teenage daughter were three things that cancer didn’t count on. ... read more

Written by Mark William Jackson on 11-05-2011, 15 user comments

Tobogganing, childrenʼs writing, lateral thinking and (unfortunately) Martin Amis

Amis as Max – Patricia StormsI have often wondered whether a blog on childrenʼs literature was appropriate for the Overland blog. Then issue 202 appeared with cover feature on Shaun Tan and a column by Alison Croggon about the experience of childhood and the often-inaccurate interpretation of it ...

Many years ago I found myself hurtling down a snow-covered hill aboard a toboggan. As the toboggan, captained by my elder brother, hurtled toward the large mound of snow that bordered the carpark – with no sign of slowing down – two things were at the forefront of my mind. The first was the knowledge that the toboggan had no braking system; I knew this because I had inspected it thoroughly before reluctantly climbing on. The second was the feeling that most of the people in the world were clearly idiots, particularly those who seemed to enjoy and willingly participate in snow sports. I was three years old. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 3-05-2011, 7 user comments

Alison Croggon, columnist

Beginning with issue 202, Alison Croggon is writing a regular column for Overland, one dedicated to books – our ideas of them and our relationships to them. Here's the first. Enjoy.

‘Some people will tell you that none of these things happened. They’ll say they were just a dream that the three of us shared. But they did happen.’
– Heaven Eyes, David Almond

I  have two vivid childhood memories of things that can’t be true. They both date from before I was four years old.

The first is of seeing a witch fly out of my ear. I was lying in bed listening to the thump of blood in my head. I remember that I was irritated by the noise, which was keeping me awake, and that I became convinced that it was the sound of footsteps in my ear canal. Then a tiny witch flew out of my ear on a broomstick and circled above my head.

The second memory is of being up late enough to see the stars. What I saw was miraculous – huge orbs of blue and red and yellow and green, blazing in a black expanse. The next time I saw the night sky, maybe a couple of years later, I nearly cried with disappointment: the pale blue points of light I saw then were wan travesties of the glories I remembered.

Obviously, neither of these things can have actually occurred: they belong in the world of dreams, and might indeed be memories of dreams. Nevertheless, they were real to me. They have the concrete quality of other memories – playing with the family dog, the taste of sour milk I drank once by accident, the resistance and release of a rusty nail piercing my foot as I trod on it – that family lore confirms actually did happen.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 29-04-2011, No comments