Improve your dinner conversation - Read
READ covers fiction, fanzines, zines with no fans except for us, websites, blogs, magazines, artist's books and other independent releases. Chances are, if it's been published then we know about it and chances are, if it's not in ThreeThousand, then we didn't like it. READ is for people who were born with ink in their veins and a fat balding critic on their shoulder. READ has also created more best-sellers than Oprah's Book Club and more wannabe to be writers than Hunter S Thompson.
Kill Your Darlings
Despite its title, there's very little actual or suggested violence between the covers of Kill Your Darlings. Unless you count Gideon Haigh's point-blank assassination of Australian book reviews.
Named for William Faulkner's oft-quoted advice to writers to 'ruthlessly cut out that which doesn't serve a purpose', the brand new fully independent local journal is neatly segmented into Commentary, Fiction, Interview and Review, assisting reader and writer alike.
Five Dials
Issue 11 of Five Dials begins with a note on lists, and how useful they can be as effective slices of biography, hinting at what's going on in a person's life at the time of list writing.
If I showed you my current list you might dislocate your jaw from yawning so hard ("Remove apostrophe from 'you're'", "Change photo background to white") so I thought instead I'd write a list of the things that went through my head while reading Five Dials:
1) Heh.
'Torpedo' on Kindle and iPhone
Providing clean air, shelter, shade, fruit, flowers, and sometimes even cashews; trees are pretty damn stupid. Take a look at your average tree and tell me it doesn't remind you of an anorexic in a green afro-wig. Am I right? Fuckin' trees. What'd they know? Sweet F. A. is what. And that's why we should resume chopping the big weird bastards down to make more books.
Changing My Mind - Occasional Essays, Zadie Smith
Call me lowbrow, but it's not often that I get a hankering to read essays. I just don't have the discipline. About 500 words in I'll start getting restless. Around the 1000 word mark I'll decide I need tea. Then conveniently, on my way back from the kitchen, I'll come across something that I simply must read RIGHT NOW, like the instructions for my blender or a week old newspaper, and it's all over.
Here and There Volume 9 - Her Life
If you think you are going to understand Here and There magazine in the next 180-200 words, think again. Here and There appears rather than gets published. It is like a dropped diary on the street, highly personal in a way that deserves to be respected, but you don't have to return it to the rightful owner.
The 10 Rules of Rock and Roll
Robert Forster is not technically a journalist. He was, however, one half of this country's answer to Lennon/McCartney in the Go-Betweens. So, consider him more than qualified for his latest gig, sitting pretty alongside Helen Garner and Clive James as the music critic for highbrow periodical The Monthly.
How a Moth Becomes a Boat
Havana is a slum, no matter what people say. If you think it's all dancing and beautiful food, Jesus Christ, you've been misinformed. It's a vile city, with plenty of poverty, rum and counterfeit cigars, and to walk away loving such a horrible place is something I put down to the writing of Ernest Hemingway and that sickly Cuban fisherman.
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