We, the students, staff, and alumni who make up the community at The University of Melbourne, reiterate the NTEU University of Melbourne Branch’s Palestine solidarity statement. We implore The University of Melbourne to stand on the right side of history by condemning Israel’s genocidal attack against the people of Palestine.

I had to innovate. I had to create a game that put the onus of invention and self-revelation back onto the players. And this is how I came up with my piece de resistance, my submission to the games hall of fame. It’s called ‘Which One Are You?’

Years after reading Flowers in the Attic, dark wardrobes and creaky houses and simmering men and thwarted women still lurk in my imagination. The book took lodging in my brain at a critical point, never to be evicted.

Crushes are often reduced to a matter of personal infatuation, but slowly I begin to realise that I have a crush on this book.

Various arguments have been made to explain hypertext fiction’s lack of mainstream success: that hypertext narratives impose impossible cognitive demands on readers; that the inability to establish meaning and coherence leaves readers always floating on the surface, never fully immersed; or (to stay on the theme of immersion) that we just want something we can read in the bath.

Growing Up Queer in Australia gifts us stories from fifty-three LGBTIQA+ people. And they are gifts: each contributor writes of themselves and their experiences with deep generosity. There are stories of grief and loss, of coming out, of discrimination, of joy and shame, of awkward sex and great sex, of navigating identity, family, community and love. These stories come from a wide range of viewpoints, and from people at varied stages of their own personal journeys.

We're now about 40 years into the period where literary prizes have become the dominant means of literary taste-making, and they are basically terrible at it. Does anyone really believe that the winner of a major prize in a given year is the best book?

As wild and genre-bending and hellacious as her prose is, though, Emanuel’s novel can be placed alongside things we have read: James Joyce’s Ulysses, Samuel Beckett’s body of work, and, more locally, Jack Cox’s Dodge Rose. But while Cox’s debut was lauded in the Guardian and the Saturday Paper, described variously as exciting, original, and brilliant, critical responses to Emanuel seem strangely subdued.

What drives my work now, and what I think is a big question for us post-#MeToo, is the potential for erotica and sex-fiction writing and reading to play a part in creating a non-fiction world, or a new sexual reality for women.

A world without stories. What would this world look like? Would we become even greater strangers to each other? How would I know who you are or how you felt, or what you thought, or what it is like to be you in a world that is in desperate need of creating greater world competency in our understanding of each other?

We asked Overland contributors, volunteers, staff and editors to share their highs and lows of 2018.

Collective outrage was growing in August 2017, when Australia’s mandatory detention regime killed another asylum seeker, Hamed Shamshiripour, on Manus Island. As argued by Maddee Clark at Deakin’s Gender and Sexuality Studies seminar series, the Australian parliament sought to distract the public from the asylum seeker issue, and so a two-month long postal survey emerged on marriage equality.

Overland is looking to expand its team of fiction and poetry readers, and to start a team of nonfiction readers. These volunteer positions only require a time commitment of a few hours per month.

What I want to do in this essay is to offer a suggestive and perhaps even a provocative reading of Tony Birch’s Ghost River.

Nevertheless – contrary to Overington’s sneering claim that at literary festivals it’s ‘panel after panel on climate change’ – I was initially struck by the dearth of discussion on the subject at this year’s Adelaide Writers’ Week, despite its theme of ‘change’ and the presence of authors, such as Clive Hamilton, who have written extensively on the subject. After all, if writers’ festivals are to be platforms for, in the words of a recent Sydney Writers’ Festival statement, ‘urgent, necessary and sometimes difficult’ conversations, then clearly climate change must be the litmus test.

Goodreads is about comparison, for better or worse. How many books have you read compared to your friends, your co-workers, your best mate’s mum? What did you think of this book, or that one? The insidious idea of success being measurable through percentages of pages read and stars out of five can reduce reading to another milestone, another item on the to-do list, another way to perform how intelligent, successful, and admirable we are, or want to be.