Peter Craven made a grave prognosis in his recent defence of the cultural worth of Meanjin: ‘If Meanjin is taken online, it will cease effectively to exist.’ On Thursday on Drum Tim Dunlop countered with: ‘The sooner magazines like Meanjin engage with the realities of online reading – and pray their financiers give them enough […]

Regular readers will be aware of the back-and-forth between the writer, blogger and academic Emmett Stinson, and various Overland peeps. I’ve been away for the last fortnight, and so missed the most recent installments in the saga. Then, this morning when I started writing in Jane’s thread, my brief comments blew out so much that […]

Over at Kill Your Darlings, Emmett Stinson has written an essay about two Australian responses to Ted Genoways’ much discussed polemic ‘The Death of Fiction’: Davina Bell’s ‘To My Generation of Precious Snowflakes’ (harvest, Winter 2010) and Jacinda Woodhead’s ‘A response to harvest’ (Overland blog, July 2010). Among other things, Genoways argues that ‘most American […]

So you, the reader, want to save independent publishing in Australia? Go forth and buy a book. Be daring: buy an armful. The truly intrepid might add a subscription, or several, to one of Australia’s exceptional literary journals – a commitment to the health of the Australian literary scene, if you will. This isn’t to […]

Today, I’ve been putting away a full run of old Overlands. As we move to the launch of edition 200, it seemed like an idea to put up a few of the past covers that caught my eye. So here’s  a bunch of them, selected on no basis other than I thought that they looked […]

The beginning Overland’s 200th issue, believe it or not, has just gone to print. That’s 56 years and 200 issues. Who would’ve thought a humble, left-wing magazine founded by Realist Writers group from the Communist Party would still be hale and hearty in 2010? And not just hale, not just hearty, but at the forefront […]

I’m not sure if you’ve heard, but journals are no longer confined to the printed periodical. Shocking, yet true. Even in traditional publishing spheres, content production is being approached in pioneering ways. The publishing house that immediately comes to mind – and I swear I’m not a McSweeney’s fanatic – is, well, McSweeney’s. McSweeeny’s publish […]

In 2009, Barry Scott, Transit Lounge publisher, received a CAL grant to investigate the American independent publishing scene. In his Overland essay, Barry shares his research – from Chin Music Press to McSweeney’s – and reflects on what that independent spirit could mean for Australian publishing: During 2009 I was the fortunate recipient of a […]

What’s Right? The future of conservatism in Australia Waleed Aly Black Inc. Malcolm Fraser has officially resigned his membership of the Liberal Party, believing that the party has moved too far to the right, claiming it is no longer a liberal party, but a conservative party. Waleed Aly might disagree. In the latest Quarterly Essay, […]

Someone once said that an artist’s job is to hold the attention of an audience for as long as they require it. It may have been Oscar Wilde, but this reviewer suspects it was actually a character in The West Wing. Perhaps it was a character in The West Wing quoting Oscar Wilde – either […]

Well, not really: just wanted to say that, following those discussions, we have amended what we’re asking in our search for new Overland bloggers. On the one hand, because we can’t pay them, we don’t expect them to contribute on a weekly basis. We’re happy for people to blog whenever they can. On the other, […]

For obvious reasons, this is a topic of some import here at Overland, as well as everywhere else around the world. The recent Ted Genoways article in Mother Jones has generated considerable discussion; now, the book blog at the LA Times has weighed in. I’ve just come back from an Australia Council meeting about literary […]