journals



Australian Literary Journals: Virtual and social

Twenty years ago, if you published a quarterly literary journal, you could be certain what that meant: four issues a year. When Anna Hedigan wrote her overview of journals and their web presence eight years ago not much had changed. The publishers’ attitude to the online space was that it was essentially a placeholder for the print journal.

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Angela Meyer Reviews Etchings

Love & Something is the sub-header of :etchings 9, and the something seems to stand for the multitudinous meanings the word love can inspire – familial, romantic, love of nature, passion for work – and the variety of things that sit beside it such as desire, heartbreak, longing and memory.

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Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews HEAT

This issue of HEAT being named as the magazine’s last could indicate two separate things. One is the opportunity that arises from this; with each ending a new beginning could take place. The other is that the magazine might not be ending.

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Joel Scott Reviews Southerly

Faced with the considerable range of work in Southerly‘s Golden Tongues: The Arts of Translation issue, I have resorted to the what’s hot/what’s not school of literary criticism, identifying what were for me the ten most notable elements in the collection.

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Heather Taylor-Johnson Reviews Southerly

The poets in this special poetry issue of Southerly stand for what is now, what is exciting/experimental and what is quality. But did Kate Lilley hand pick most of these poets, ensuring the issue would be tight, stylistically, and adhere to a chosen dogma? She does say in her intro that ‘Of the many poems that turned up in my inbox, already pre-selected by their authors, these are the ones that struck me most’.

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Anna Forsyth Reviews Going Down Swinging

This was my first full dip into the reputable journal Going Down Swinging and so I started with the index. It is not often that you find entries of such intriguing fragments as ‘shoot a harpoon into its golden centre' or ‘the dark play of your wet eyes'. The entries that drew me in the most were ‘terrorism, blah blah' and ‘would sever the possum's head'.

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Bridie McCarthy Reviews Going Down Swinging and Indigo

At the level of function, a literary journal produces a collection of writing on a periodical basis. However, a journal is also another kind of machine, an apparatus which generates a readership, presents writers, exercises its own ideological assumptions (however loosely formed or evolving), and which makes claims to a certain cultural space. At this discursive level, Going Down Swinging and Indigo are very different animals.

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Alice Allan Reviews Ten Years of Things That Didn’t Kill Us

When Paroxysm Press sent out their call for submissions in March last year for an anthology titled Ten Years of Things That Didn't Kill Us, they had just one piece of advice for writers: 'we want it to be as Paroxysm as hell'. The result – a collection of poetry and prose from writers well-known to Paroxysm followers along with a number of new contributors – isn't intended to please everyone.

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GDS 27 Spoken Word Feature!

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Genevieve Tucker: Online? Present & Accounted For

In 2003 Cordite commissioned Anna Hedigan to review the websites of Australia's established literary journals. Now, four years later, we ask: what's changed? Genevieve Tucker's update looks at the online presences of some of Australia's litjournals in the context of …

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David Prater: Hits & Online Readership

Frank Moorhouse's article in The Sunday Age (full text here) discusses the ongoing Meanjin 'controversy' in a much-needed context: that of the troubles currently facing print magazines, as well as some of the problems facing online magazines in Australia.

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Moses Iten Reviews rattapallax 10

I have to admit, I picked up issue 10 of rattapallax for 'The Age of MC SOLAAR' cover story. Although my French is still very limited, I have had quite a few tracks by the Senegal-born, Paris-bred, hip-hop superstar on high rotation for several years. Undoubtedly, his flow alone is dope enough for heads of any language.

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Komninos Zervos Reviews Papertiger #3

The third CD-ROM of poetry has been released by Papertiger Media and yet again presents the work of many of Australia's finest contemporary poets. As well, the Editors have included an eclectic array of international contributors from Canada, Finland, the UK, the USA and Australasia. More interestingly it is the expanded use of the new digital format of this collection i.e. the CD-ROM.

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Moses Iten Reviews Rattapallax 7

Although conceived in the melting pot of New York, a city often described as the capital of the world, Rattapallax Press is produced by Ram Devineni, originally from India. Crucially, as Devineni's first issue released after September 11, 2001, Rattapallax 7 deals with the horrific loss of innocence as seen through the eyes of the diverse populace of New York. While the 'Words of Comfort' benefit poetry event held in October 2001 attracted the faces of Lou Reed and Claire Danes, the most powerful poems that deal with this loss are by Agha Shahid Ali, and those featured in the segment, New Arab Poetry.

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Anna Hedigan surveys Australian journals on the web

Few of these journals have capitalised on the cross-over between people who love to read “hard” books and journals, and web-readers. Do they think we're all searching for porn? Or are they worried that posting content from their journal will dilute their brand?

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Peter Savieri Reviews Going Down Swinging 20

Most people can barely speak, let alone write. So it follows that mastery of the written and spoken word is a rare qualification. This does not, however, prevent an international swamp of hacks from turning contemporary culture into a poorly realised historical theme park of rehashed, diluted, ripped-off high points from an overly romanticised 20th century.

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Timothy Yu casts his eye over Cordite #10!

In an effort to get at least one person to critically appraise our magazine, we asked Stanford-based academic and poet Timothy Yu to review Cordite 10: Location Asia-Australia. And before you ask, of course he wasn't paid for it.

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Alison Arnold summarises the launch of GDS19

Going Down Swinging survived the worst excesses of the 1980s and 1990s to arrive in 2001 alive and kicking. As befitting its reputation as a Melbourne underground institution, the Old Colonial Hotel on Brunswick Street was packed with writer types …

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Gaby Bila-Gunther: It’s not easy being zine

How can one ignore names such as Inter Urban Service, RIP, Anti-Gravity or Lose Ugly Flab By Eating Less? They come inside matchboxes, envelopes, or gently packed in wrapping paper. Some you can't even view without 3D glasses. Some are …

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