Cover of the Verso edition of We Want Everything by Nanni Balestrini

Nanni Balestrini’s We Want Everything Wins Award for My Translation

Announcing the Winner of the 2017 Italian Prose in Translation Award!Posted on October 10, 2017 by rcldaum October 7, 2017—The American Literary Translators Association (ALTA) is delighted to announce the winner of the 2016 Italian Prose in Translation Award! The award was officially announced during ALTA’s annual conference, ALTA40: Reflections/Refractions, held this year at the…

Exploring the Farmers Market: A Culinary Journey

I ate a Portuguese tart at the farmers market. The custard was cold, had the texture of craft paste and tasted like water-based sealant. The pie man stepped from foot to foot behind the pie counter: he wanted to be somewhere else.  A girl busked a violin with a tinsel-covered case on the ground in…

Ethical fast food is coming – and it’s about time

You might have seen the mural in La Trobe Street – a stretch of wall near Swanston Street painted with sad grey battery hens wearing fast food boxes over their heads: a sly shot at the burger chains, the submarine sandwich sellers and the peri peri chicken grillers. A hashtag in one corner, #fixfastfood, clues you in…

Untitled Book Club

Juliet Sulejmani | April 01, 2016   “Fiction books are my soul food, junk food and brain food all in one. More, they’re my oxygen – I need them to live.” So says Baz about why he r… Source: Untitled Book Club

Cardiometry

Darren, in a neat shirt and slacks, with an ID lanyard around his neck, a bright red chevron that signifies his membership of the cardiometrical brotherhood – they are still mostly men – Darren will pass a plastic-covered sensor over your upper left chest, where your heart is supposed, in the sense of thought, to…

Nutella donuts

Melbourne’s Nutella Donut Craze: A Sticky Revolution

Ground Zero for Melbourne’s Nutella donut boom was a quiet northern suburbs street that runs off Sydney Road opposite Fawkner Cemetery. Among the brick veneer and weatherboard bungalows built by migrants from Italy and Greece in the 1960s and 1970s is a row of shops, empty-looking except for the milk bar in the middle, Jimmy’s…

boarding pass

Boarding Pass

The people were queuing up to board, some through the front door, some through the rear, according to which line the flight attendant checking our boarding passes had assigned us: in theory the two queues would never meet, dissolving somewhere in the middle of the aircraft: “Row 19 – board through the rear door, please.…

The Life of Knives

The knife came in a special black cardboard box with the blade wrapped in newspaper and slipped into a protective vinyl scabbard. The steel was clean and bright, stippled along the spine as if it had been beaten with a small hammer, and engraved with Japanese calligraphy. The cutting edge bore a watery swirl, like…

The Sketchbook Project Draws the Line …

Jo Buckland can’t remember what she drew in the 36-page sketchbook back in 2010. When a friend told the then 20-year-old Victorian College of the Arts student about a crowd-sourced art project based at the Brooklyn Art Library in New York, she sent away for one of the $US25 A5 sketchbooks on offer. When she…