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Magazines

I have to admit that I’m a magazine junkie. With the possible exceptions of golfing and bridal magazines I’ll read any magazine – from the trashy tabloid to high-brow literary – anywhere; anytime; dentists’ waiting rooms, doctors’ waiting rooms, hairdressers’ salons and, most of all, public transport. In fact, magazines are made for public transport. Unlike reading novels you can finish an article, story, or review in the space of a P.T. trip without the narrative being interrupted by annoying practical details like getting off. Buying a magazine and making it last over a week of P.T. transport is an art, as is choosing the right magazine for the right journey. It’s not an exact science but there are compelling reasons for giving this matter serious consideration.

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Tina Brown hit the ground partying in New York when she arrived in 1983 to revive the struggling Condé Nast magazine ...

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The key theme of Overland 195 seems to be crisis. The contributors to this edition of the journal address the ‘global financial crisis’, as well as various other moments of tension and unrest in Australia’s present and past.

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Westerly edited by Delys Bird and Dennis Haskell & HEAT edited by Ivor Indyk

by
February 2007, no. 288

Who reads literary magazines, and why do they? Writers looking for what is being published, academics keeping up with who is being published, the elusive ‘general reader’ looking for a good read? The current volumes of HEAT and Westerly offer multiple reasons and rewards for picking them up, reasons which extend well beyond these superficial factors. Reasons which may send you to the postbox with a subscription form.

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‘The best preserve of our humanity’, Ian Britain writes in his editorial to this edition of Meanjin (Only Human, 63:1, edited by Ian Britain $19.95 pb, 236 pp), remains words. Whatever ‘our humanity’ is, it is protected, kept alive, maintained, conserved – in language. ‘[C]ertainly’, he clarifies, in the ‘honed, considered words of the good … literary artist’, but perhaps even in ‘verbiage’.

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‘Magazines and newspapers in Australian literature’ is a more troublesome subject than it may at first sight appear. Within its scope lurk issues and problems that preoccupy and sometimes bedevil much Australian literary criticism and cultural commentary. Indeed, the method and content of this book provide a helpful approach to those perennial issues.

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