Debate: ‘It’s time … for a universal basic income?’ 6pm, Monday 11 December Ballroom, Trades Hall 54 Victoria St, Carlton Free food, free drinks, free event!

Emerging in the wake of a British music scene divided along sharp political lines – the Clash identified as leftists, the Sex Pistols as anarchists, while the Jam (by way of differentiation rather than conviction) initially aligned themselves with conservatism – Morrissey cut a thrillingly protean figure. It was precisely his cultivated opacity, in matters of gender and sexuality especially, that appealed to the kinds of outsiders he made the subjects of so many of his lyrics.

Overland, the National Union of Workers, the Media, Entertainment & Arts Alliance, and the National Tertiary Education Union (VIC) are very pleased to announce the winning entries of this year’s Fair Australia Prize.

That’s the root of the Fair Work Ombudsman’s cultural problem. There is one law for unions in this country, and another for wage thieves.

During Children’s Book Week, I visited an elite private school where a deputy principal asked me if I thought I was doing boys a disservice by having such girly covers on my books. I politely but firmly replied that I thought people who told boys they weren’t supposed to read books with girls on the cover were doing everyone a disservice.

Australia wasn’t perfect in 1989 by any means, but something approximating that could be imagined. However, there was a change of emphasis, as if the toss of a coin had landed on the side of economics instead of people. We could find our own way, or we could copy the US and the neoliberals. We chose the latter, via Margaret Thatcher.

When you’re doing your Sunday morning shop, she’s in the apartment just overhead, being passed around by a group of gay men in various states of undress. She’s in every rainbow neighbourhood of every big city, everywhere. She’ll make your sex better and your fun wilder; make you want to fuck for days and days. And maybe, if you need it, she’ll make your shame go away. The people Tina touches are like no ‘junkie’ I’ve ever seen or met.

An important figure in Italian and European communism, Bordiga was every bit as prominent as his friend and rival Antonio Gramsci in the decade following the Russian Revolution of 1917. As leader of the abstentionist faction of the Socialist Party, he was at the centre of the split that led to the founding of the Communist Party of Italy, of which he served as secretary while Mussolini seized power.

We’ll make you think, we’ll challenge you, we’ll move you – and in our pages you’ll read things you disagree with. As one subscriber wrote to us just yesterday, ‘Every now and then I want to throw Overland across the room – which I consider a brilliant thing.’

Anyone who subscribes, resubscribes or donates before Friday goes into the draw to win some truly stellar prizes, including bikes, beekeeping workshops, artistic boot camps, award-winning books, bundles of excellent magazines, music, art and trips to Byron Bay.

What started as a trickle of hashtags, a game of safety and invisibility in numbers, quickly grew to become personal, overwhelming, and eviscerating. Longer and longer posts appeared, ritual defenestrations from our hard-won rooms of our own into a world that remained silent and complicit. The gamut of responses from fellow victims alone ran from deep sympathy, love, and solidarity to complete and utter standstill (switching off modems at the wall and burying phones under concrete slabs). I was firmly in the latter camp.

By taking out, renewing or giving an Overland subscription today, you could win: – today’s ‘Parental leave’ prize – any of the three Major Prizes – and/or one of our Regional Prizes – a good feeling about yourself – and the future of progressive literary culture

If rock music amplifies capitalism’s misogyny, racism and male entitlement, it’s not surprising that rock star politics are often built out of those things.

This is very resonant with fiction for me, and something I think many writers neglect to consider deeply: what shape is your story, and why is it made this way? I often reread Ursula Le Guin’s essay, ‘The carrier bag theory of fiction’, which talks about the issue of narrative form as a radical project – and the idea of using the story as a container for something.

Okay, we decided to narrow it down from 1,917 reasons to simply the top 17!

Overland is thrilled to announce the successful applicant of its second residency program, which this year was open to First Nations writers.