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 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.