Monthly Archives: February 2010
From the Editors, Issue One
‘It’s one thing to kill your darlings, quite another to throw the baby out with the bathwater’ – Martin Shaw’s response to Gideon Haigh
It would appear that Gideon Haigh found it irresistible – when invited to write a piece for a new magazine called Kill Your Darlings – to mount a wholesale assault not just on his putative target, (alleged) hack reviewers, but the wider Oz literary culture itself – … Read more
Events, Issue One, Press
Gideon Haigh’s ‘Feeding the Hand that Bites: The Demise of Australian Literary Reviewing’ [excerpt]
Everybody wants to go to heaven, as they say, but nobody wants to die. So it is in the world of book reviewing. Everyone is in favour of frank and fearless criticism, up to the point where a work of theirs might come off the worse for … Read more
Press
‘Truth and elegance soured’: Susan Wyndham on Gideon Haigh’s Kill Your Darlings piece
Susan Wyndham of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote about Kill Your Darlings on Saturday: Among the essays, fiction, reviews, cartoons and interview with Sarah Waters, Undercover was most curious to read Gideon Haigh’s piece Feeding the Hand that Bites on “the demise of Australian literary reviewing”. The … Read more
News
A belated welcome
Those of you who have curiously peeked at this website before will know that it has recently undergone a few changes. First, it looks a little different. Second, the blog has acquired a new name: Killings (an apostrophe-less contraction of the journal name, naturally). Third, it has … Read more
Press
‘We want to be publishing fiction and non-fiction that has a fearlessness to it’: Rebecca Starford on The Conversation Hour
Yesterday, Kill Your Darlings Editor, Rebecca Starford, appeared on Jon Faine’s The Conversation Hour (ABC Melbourne radio) to talk about the impetus behind the journal and Melbourne’s rich literary scene. She was joined by Niki Savva, author of So Greek: Confessions of a Conservative Leftie. You can … Read more
News
Booing idiots, ‘accidental’ groping and Florence and the Machine: Blissed out at Melbourne’s Laneway Festival
Yes, it’s that time of year again, where the young and old get their toes tapping to the tunes all around Australia: music festival season. With events like Big Day Out, Laneway, Good Vibrations, Soundwave, V Festival, Future Music and Bluesfest storming cities around the country, there’s … Read more
News
‘You may be a precious snowflake, but if you can't express your individuality in sterling prose, I don't want to read about it’: The ‘death of fiction’ in the US?
There was a fascinating post on Mother Jones website last week about the state of literary magazine culture in the United States. Ted Genoways, editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, wrote on what he views as the demise of the publication – and appreciation – of short … Read more
