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Review

Literary radicals and revolutionary acts

Author
Ali Alizadeh
Posted on
24 May 2013

The Years of Lead (Anni di piombo) is the title given to a period of political upheaval and explosive urban unrest in recent Italian history. Charged with the spirit of earlier autonomist and workerist actions, and energised by the global upsurge in rebellion and subversion in the late 1960s, a myriad of far-left factions, supporters and other radicals took to the streets of major Italian cities during the 70s. Some took up arms against the capitalist state and its neo-fascist accomplices in a series of violent, at times deadly, confrontations, provoked, in many instances, by excessive state repression.

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Cruel Miracles

Tortured women, guilty men and dead children

Author
Stephen Wright
Posted on
17 May 2013

The Wallander books, and movies, are part of a whole recent genre of super-popular Swedish detective novels that have all made it onto TV or the cinema screen or both. It’s not just the Swedes of course. For example, the Danish TV series The Killing and the Danish-Swedish collaboration The Bridge both feature a lot of the conventions of Swedish noir: women detectives, the sadistic murder of women, dead or traumatised children, political corruption, numerous plot twists, and a preoccupation with the mental states of women and the paternal identities of men. The Killing and The Bridge both have endings that make the final scene of Hamlet look cheerful. Perhaps Shakespeare had a hunch about Danes.

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Review

Twitcher

Author
Tony Birch
Posted on
14 May 2013

The desperate life of the family is in sharp contrast to the shifting economic boom of the town more generally. Despite his youthful age Kenno has left school and is holding down two jobs in a determined effort to support the struggling family. He not only works in a shop during the day, but also helps his alcoholic and depressed father in his cleaning business.

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Review

‘Not quite broken’

Author
Tony Birch
Posted on
16 April 2013

The ensemble cast of Harmless includes Dave, a career criminal and all round desperado, who we meet at the beginning a long prison sentence for armed robbery; his young daughter, Amanda, a girl we both fear and admire for her sense of street-wise resilience (who uses wonderfully economical language, including the much neglected ‘fuck-knuckle’); Sua, Dave’s girlfriend, who is escaping a troubled past in her homeland, Thailand, and the dark secret she carries with her; and her father, Rattuwat, a man burdened by a sense of failure as a father, who has arrived in Australia under tragic circumstances.

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Editors

On Australia’s ‘lack of tolerance’ in art, film, TV and music

Author
David Brun
Posted on
11 April 2013

Dean Biron is an independent scholar who has taught, researched and published in areas such as media studies, child protection and welfare, popular music, Australian film, sociology and criminology. In 2011 he was co-awarded the ABR Calibre Essay Prize for his work ‘The Death of the Writer’. He is also a former police detective. We chat to Dean today about his essay ‘The Aesthetics of Conservatism’, which appears in the latest issue of Overland.

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Review

‘History (is) a text demanding to be read’

Author
Alison Croggon
Posted on
10 April 2013

‘But we are not historians, and this is not a history book.’ As with its putative subject, the convict outlaw Moondyne Joe, it’s hard to say in a short review what this book, in fact, is: a mixture of history, poetry, criticism, political analysis, memoir and literary esprit, it’s a work that consciously resists closure and definition.

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