EXCLUSIVE!: Dispatches from The Paris End

by Cameron Hurst, Sally Olds, Oscar Schwartz

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 eighteen lively essays from the first years of The Paris End. 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 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.

Genres: Essays

314 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2025

Reviews

[ally · Rating 5 out of 5]

i LOVE the paris end 🫶🫶🥰😸🙂‍↕️🙂‍↕️

[ariana · Rating 5 out of 5]

masters of the form….

[Declan Fry]

Bringing together three years of writing from The Paris End, this is the must-read of the summer. The Paris End was born from the promise of finally being able to meet people again following Melbourne's endless lockdowns, when three writers gathered and decided to create a news service with a mission: "A society magazine for the precariat."

The spirit of The Paris End is that of Melbourne. You can really see, feel and hear the city as you read it, "a cosmopolitan purgatory where one could find a Gucci, a Prada, a Balenciaga and cocktail bars, but also bubble tea vendors, corporate lackeys sucking on vapes, food delivery drivers, revolutionaries, street preachers and grifting DJs."

Exclusive! is generous and consistently surprising. Gossipy, funny, engaged and aggressively, heartbreakingly good, Exclusive! is a chronicle of our weird times for all the weirdos out there building them. Forget Rosalia, forget the designs of Paris Fashion Week: Exclusive! is this year's must-have collection.

Read on:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2025-11-2...

[Karen Freilich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Naarmcore delight

[Lia Perkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was skeptical about this being a book - what belongs on substack surely cannot entertain for a book? But I think it does, they are bright and curious essays