EXCLUSIVE! Dispatches from The Paris End

An anthology from the longform email newsletter The Paris End, read by thousands every week, in which three young writers together explore the cultural mores, highlights and backwaters of contemporary Melbourne.

A few years ago, Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds and Oscar Schwartz sat down for a beer at a Melbourne pub and decided to start a newsletter. It would be called The Paris End, after the aspirationally cosmopolitan (yet persistently grotty) hilltop at the eastern end of Melbourne’s city centre. It would seek to make much of a striving metropolis. It would publish hyperlocal, irreverent, long-form literary journalism – a dirty martini and a good gossip in email form.

EXCLUSIVE! brings together a selection of nineteen lively essays from the first years of The Paris End, each illustrated by house cartoonist, Aaron Billings. Hurst, Olds and Schwartz take you into corset-making studios, art fairs, micro-dairies, apartment developments, university pubs, biohacking spas, court rooms, and the musty offices of the city’s Lacanian psychoanalysts. They ask urgent questions, such as: Can the male lesbian speak? Would you want to live forever if you had to live in Docklands? How does one emulate Frank Moorhouse’s financial ability to stay fed with caviar, and watered with champagne?

In this anthology, three distinct voices collaborate to mythologise a time and place, making Melbourne feel as worthy of attention as London, New York or Berlin.

Read an excerpt from the introduction here.

How can something as scarily hip as The Paris End also be so warm and clever and endearing?
Helen Garner

Generous and consistently surprising. Gossipy, funny, engaged and with a real nous for capturing scenes and people and the beauty and bullshit, the tone throughout every piece is spot-on, perfectly calibrated and full of charm. It is a book to be read in Milan, Tokyo, London, Melbourne. It’s so hip it hurts. Aggressively, heartbreakingly good, EXCLUSIVE! is a chronicle of our weird times for all the weirdos out there building them… [it’s] this year’s must-have collection.
Declan Fry, ABC Arts

When real writers [not party corporate hacks //// !] from, with, and by their own volition, decide – Fuck it! – and go out and walk the streets to “get to”, or to “see to”, or “feel” what’s out there, and dodge the traffic, and the No Standing signs, and pay the bus fare, and taxi fare, to get me a story, they win! I open my heart to them! Good or bad they take me along with them, and for that I’m grateful.
π.O. (Pi.O.)

Unapologetically hip, intellectual and local – mostly Melbourne but with occasional foreign filings – it’s a little queer, a little Jewish and very clever, covering everything from raw milk to male lesbians to traditional Catholics… somehow this book offers earnestness and humour without pretension.
The Saturday Paper

It’s a bit gonzo and a bit beat and it works. They sound like a lot of people I know and love: an acerbic, frenetic, Australian voice… [EXCLUSIVE!] might just be the best [book] you read all year.
Honi Soit

Considering the complexity of subject matter, the essays tread an impressively fine line – offering a take that is interesting and substantial, yet not hectoring… all are funny, gossipy and delightfully weird. The quality of the prose is also consistently high, a prerequisite for long-form literary journalism. It is the rare Substack email newsletter that works as a book.
The Conversation