AustLit

'Eight years ago, I wrote  a short piece for Overland called ‘Pay the Writers’. I was fed up with being asked to work for ‘exposure’. It was a time when a lot of writing work was moving online, and this work was often unpaid. Writers were at risk of losing our incomes entirely. If anything needed some exposure, it was the working conditions of freelancers.' (Introduction)

'I had a body once before. I didn't always love it. I knew the skin as my limit, and there were times I longed to leave it. I knew better than to wish for this.

'This is the story of Yun. It's the story of Adam. Two young people. A familiar chase.

'But this is not a love story. It's a story of revenge, transformation, survival. Feel something, the body commands. Feel this. But it's a phantom . . . I go untouched.

'They want their body back.

'Who are we, if we lose hold of the body? What might we become?

'The Airways shifts between Sydney and Beijing, unsettling the boundaries of gender and power, consent and rage, self and other, and even life and death.

A powerful, inventive, and immersive novel from award-winning author Jennifer Mills.' (Publication summary)

'I’ve felt sad about a lot of things this year, and Gucci’s broken front window doesn’t make the list.

'Just over two weeks ago, protests in Turin, where I live, briefly provided the kind of images that travel internationally: fireworks, smoke bombs, a little tear gas. In one shot, there was a burning pile of the shared electric scooters that have become as ubiquitous as face masks lately. Groups of cops shuffled along in shields and helmets, circled by the smoke. As Italy slides into another lockdown, as the second wave of coronavirus infections crashes over Europe, there is no disputing that the mood is different. But to describe the protests as uniformly ‘anti-lockdown’ would be a simplification.' (Introduction)

'In the week since the release of the IPBES report that alerted us to the likely loss of a million species, there have been a spate of articles engaging with climate grief. Activist Rob Law wrote in the Guardian about needing to honour the pain and move through the sadness towards a sense of agency. Emily Johnson argued beautifully for the ways in which taking collective action can offset the sometimes overwhelming sense of loss.'  (Introduction)

'We were both beckoned to the office, but I had nothing to do with it. I would explain this to Savio, I decided, as I followed him inside. For once, I would be honest. Sinclair left the door open behind us. We sat in the hard chairs Savio indicated with a soft wave. I did not look at Sinclair as he crossed his legs beside me. I watched Savio roost in his big swivel chair. I took out words like stones and turned them over. But before I could arrange them, Savio turned his monitor to face us, and there I was in the centre of the frame...' (Publication abstract)

'Dystopia ‘cannot imagine a better future, and it doesn’t ask anyone to bother to make one. It nurses grievances and indulges resentments; it doesn’t call for courage; it finds that cowardice suffices. Its only admonition is: Despair more.’ So wrote Jill Lepore in the New Yorker last year. The piece was at least partly an expression of impatience, perhaps even boredom, with the imaginative reach of recent novels and with genre fiction in general (she calls it ‘pulp literature’). Lepore names this trend ‘radical pessimism’, but omits any exploration of what that ‘radical’ might mean.' (Introduction)

'I have been writing about the giant Australian cuttlefish, Sepia apama, for years, but this is my first time seeing them in the wild. I have watched countless videos, read numerous books and articles, and repeatedly visited the permanent display in the South Australian Museum’s biodiversity gallery. Sepia apama swims in and out of my novel Dyschronia in various shapes and sizes – even as metaphor, as literary image, they insisted on transforming, slipping out from all my nets of meaning. I have obsessed over these strange creatures until they felt like a part of my inner life. I thought I knew what I was going to be looking at.' (Introduction)

'My mother Margaret is an artist, although she wouldn’t say as much without adding some qualification. Let’s say she is a landscape painter. When she turned 70 I invited her to spend two weeks as artist in residence at a place in Bilpin, west of Sydney. If this seems generous, you should know that I also invited myself; I wanted to write about it. The gifts of writers, of daughters, come with qualifications too.' (Introduction)

'Our monthly Australian books column also features Melissa Browne, Craig Sherborne and Debra Oswald telling us about their new releases and the books they’re looking forward to.' 

'One morning, the residents of a coastal small town wake to discover the sea has disappeared, leaving them 'landlocked'. However, the narrator has been seeing visions of this cataclysm for years. Is she a prophet? Does she have a disorder that skews her perception of time (the 'Dyschronia' of the title). Or is she just a liar?

'Mills' novel takes contemporary issues of resource depletion and climate change and welds them to one young woman's migraine-inducing nightmares. Her narrator's prevision anticipates a world where entire communities are left to fend for themselves: economically drained, socially fractured, trapped between a hardscrabble past and an uncertain future.' (Publication summary)

'A dialogue between Overland’s fiction and poetry editors about the art and practice of editing.'

'In Spring of 1972, Overland published a short story by a little-known writer from Bacchus Marsh. Two years later, this story opened Peter Carey's debut collection, The Fat Man in History, which launched his career here and internationally; he has since become that rare Australian literary figure who is both immensely popular and critically respected.' (Introduction)