In the past few weeks friends and family from around the country have asked me, with a deep urgency in their tone: ‘What is it like to be there? What does it feel like? How would you describe it?’ These questions throw me because, like any project of describing life as it happens around you, […]

I first went down to Occupy Wall Street last Sunday, almost a week after it had started. I didn’t go down before because I, like many of my other brown friends, was wary of what we had heard or just intuited that it was mostly a young, white male scene. When I asked friends about […]

Hari Kunzru is the author of the novels Gods without Men and The Impressionist. He lives in Hackney, east London. He has kindly given permission to republish his Guardian article on the recent riots. There’s nothing like fear and hatred to sharpen the senses. The riots have shown Britain some unpalatable truths about itself, making […]

Robin Hemley is the author of eight books, and his stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, New York Magazine, Chicago Tribune, and many literary magazines and anthologies. He is the editor of Defunct magazine, where this piece was first published. Robin received his MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop; he currently […]

Californian writer and academic Aaron Bady continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. See more of Aaron Bady’s work at zunguzungu, where this piece was originally published. Ignorance and the moral fabric of the American state Last November, Hillary Clinton responded to WikiLeaks’ […]

Stephen Henighan continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Stephen Henighan is a celebrated writer of non-fiction, novels and short stories. He was born in Hamburg, Germany to an English mother and a father whose parents were Scots-Irish immigrants to New York. His […]

Elizabeth Kadetsky continues our series of regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Elizabeth Kadetsky’s short stories have been chosen for a Puschart Prize, Best New American Voices and Best American Short Stories notable stories of 2009, and her personal essays have appeared in the New York […]

This is the first of what will become regular cross-posts from international writers or journals with similar political or aesthetic sensibilities to Overland. Over the last few years, the Overland blog has built a small but flourishing community of writers debating politics and culture from a largely Australian perspective. The new cross-posts aim to build […]