Best of 2015 reading list
As 2015 draws to a close, we’re inundated with ‘best of year’ reading lists… so here’s one more. Mind you, being a literary journal, we did feel that we’d love to see a list focused on shorter pieces - the powerful and memorable short stories, essays, and poems some of our contributors and editors have encountered this year. Enjoy!
Laura Jane Cassidy
I read so many gems this year, but these ones immediately come to mind. Heartbreaking, powerful, gorgeous writing that has stayed with me:
Dispatches from Trauma Island - Katie Coyle
Escape from New York - Zadie Smith
Wish - Kerrie O’Brien
Oranges - Roisin Kelly
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Lucy Sweeney Byrne
I know that Christmas is a time when I should probably promote reading heart-warming tales set around fireplaces, or that involve at least one whiff of something baking off to the narrator’s left somewhere, but to be honest, as days become poorly illuminated extensions of night, and the sleet finally manages to seep all the way through to my bones (sleet; officially the worst of all weathers), I take my comfort from tales of existential angst and general melancholia, that reassure me of the normality of my own. Even more so than usual, perhaps! A time of year in which one can really indulge in misery, really sink your teeth into it, and decide to actually, really, in all seriousness not get up (it’s dark anyway!) and instead stay in bed, reading, wallowing with all of the vaguely disillusioned (misery guts) writers who’ve gone before.
1) My favourite short story of all time, Bartleby the Scrivener - Herman Melville
2) Good Old Neon - David Foster Wallace
3) The first ‘poem’ in Trés - Roberto Bolano
4) I Am Not Going To Get Up Today - Dr Seuss
5) ‘Dance, Sing, Earn Your Keep’ - Nicole Flattery (The Stinging Fly issue #32)
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Dylan Brennan
I spent the year reading (and writing) what people generally refer to as non-fiction. While I love the physicality of a printed publication, seeing as it’s Christmas, my list is made up of pieces that are available online—free and legal gifts.
Goddess of Destruction - Rob Doyle
Trespassers on the rooftops: a secret history of Mexico City’s cultural revolutionaries - Valeria Luiselli
May 29 - Sergio Pitol
Cactus Dreams: Confessions of an American Pulque Drinker - Grant Cogswell
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Mel Pryor
My favourite poem of 2015 is Jacob Polley’s ‘I Try to Explain a Flower’ which I found on Day 95 of the online website New Boots and Pantisocracies. It’s one I’ve gone back to and back to through the year. The poem this year that made me cry and hit me immediately in the gut was Jane Clarke’s poem ‘Metastasis’ which is online in the brilliant new web poetry magazine The Compass. I’d recommend the poetry pamphlet Night Letter by Fiona Moore, published by HappenStance, which is short but contains beautifully crafted, elegant poems. I’m still trying to get hold of her first pamphlet which is sold out. My number one poetry translation of the year is Hungerpots, New and Selected Poems by the Dutch poet Hester Knibbe, translated by American poet Jacquelyn Pope and published by Eyewear.
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Lynsey May
Dear Future - Jenni Fagan
and
Pretty Dead Girl Takes a Break - Helen McClory (which came out last year but her debut short story collection On the Edges of Vision just won the Saltire First Book of the Year Award)
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Claire Hennessy
I have to give a shout-out to fellow editor Eimear Ryan’s short story ‘Lane In Stay’, which you can read online at the Irish Times and was the final story in the mighty The Long Gaze Back collection, edited by Sinead Gleeson. I also adored Sarah Bannan’s ‘Because Privacy’, written for Human Rights Day. Most of the writing that’s stuck with me this year, though, has been non-fiction. I loved Sara Baume writing about the financial realities of writing literary fiction, and there have been a number of terrific pieces at The Coven, especially Roe McDermott’s ‘Twelve Dancing Princesses’. Katy Waldman’s piece for Slate about eating disorders is also well worth a read. Finally, ‘How To Tell If You Are In A Maeve Binchy Novel’ (The Toast) pleased me immensely.
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Eloisa Amezcua
One poem from the October 2015 issue of Poetry Magazine really stands out for me. It’s “On Leaving the Body to Science” by Claudia Emerson. There are also three more poems by Emerson, including an introduction by Emilia Philips in the most recent issue of Waxwing Magazine. All of these poems which will be compiled into a posthumous collection show the reality of coming to terms with one’s own life in the face of cancer. They’re both beautiful and raw, gentle and powerful.
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Deirdre Sullivan
Roe Mc Dermott’s recent article for The Coven was gorgeous, and this made me really happy for some reason.
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Kelly Creighton
A mini essay, Moyra Donaldson’s most recent blog post on her identity as a Northern Irish poet. I would also recommend the stunning title poem from Donaldson’s Liberties Press published collection The Goose Tree, which you can read on its own at Chris Murray’s wonderful Poethead blog.
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Elizabeth O’Connell-Thompson
One poem and one essay from me:
Émilie du Châtelet - Carlo Matos
On Pandering - Claire Vaye Watkins
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Eleanor Hooker
And then there are those short stories, which when you’re reading them, cause you free fall through paragraphs in your rush to know what’ll happen next, how its going to end, and whether the characters (who in the short time you’ve got to know them, you’ve come to care for), will be okay. For me, ‘The Quiet’ and ‘Creed’ by Carys Davies, are two such stories.
After a first breathless reading, you return a second time, quieter now, to savour the telling, and then a third time to study the craft of storytelling at its very best. There are no hints to suggest how these stories will progress, and the endings are so unexpected, so unsettling, that you find yourself thoughtful long after you’ve closed the book.
‘The Quiet’ and ‘Creed’ are included in Davies’ second collection of short stories The Redemption of Galen Pike (Salt 2014), which this year won the Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award and the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize.
In simple terms, short stories are driven by the desires and needs of a character, who by the end of the story has been changed, for good or ill. There is always compromise and consequently some measure of regret is ever present.
Excellent poems that consist in all of the elements above, but which never lose their ground as poetry, and which I will never tire of reading are: ‘That Actor Kiss’ by Michael Hartnett (Selected And New Poems, Gallery Press), ‘Ter Conatus’ by Bernard O’Donoghue (Selected Poems, Faber and Faber), ‘Before You’ by Leeanne Quinn (Before You, Dedalus Press), ‘Amber’ by John Glenday (The Golden Mean, Picador Poetry), ‘The Dead’ by Jessica Traynor (Liffey Swim, Dedalus Press), ‘He was the Forgotten Thing’ by Kim Moore (The Art of Falling, Seren), ‘Throttled’ by Michelle O’Sullivan (The Blue End of Stars, Gallery Press), ‘The Road of Excess Leads to the Palace of Wisdom’ by Grace Wells (Fur, Dedalus Press), ‘Portrait of the Artist’s Mother as a Merlin’ by Breda Wall Ryan (In A Hare’s Eye, Doire Press).
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David Gogan
Michael Marshall Smith’s 'Hell Hath Enlarged Herself’ is that rare horror story that genuinely unsettles. Smith is always strong at deft depiction of the everyday difficulties of relationships and the pain of loss, and much of this story is taken up with sketching in the narrator’s life, interspersed with increasingly disturbing interludes with the present day. There are echoes of Stephen King throughout, and it’s somewhat of a companion piece thematically for King’s 'The End of the Whole Mess’. But where King’s story ends abruptly, Smith’s is a clockwork mechanism; the overt horror doesn’t show up till the last few pages, and turns on a single line (“… how many people did you invite tonight?”) but from that point you realise that not a single preceding sentence has been wasted. There’s no “twist”, but the payoff is scary and genuinely moving.
'Hell Hath Enlarged Herself’ can be found in Michael Marshall Smith’s collection What You Make It, or as a single story for Kindle.
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Therese Cox
I really would like to add to the list Anne Boyer’s brilliant essay in Bookforum, “Not Writing.”
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Eimear Ryan
I read Kevin Breathnach’s bracingly honest essay 'A Summer in Paris’ in The Dublin Review early in the year and it stayed with me.
Another Parisian one: Victoria Kennefick’s 'Paris Syndrome’ in the Young Irish Poets edition of Poetry is so gleeful and knowing. You can also hear her read it on the Poetry podcast.
'Nos Da’, the final story in We Don’t Know What We’re Doing by Thomas Morris, is a knockout.
I was lucky enough to hear the mighty Anne Enright deliver her essay 'Antigone in Galway’ at UCC recently – required reading.
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Sinead Gleeson
I’m picking two essays by Rebecca Solnit, because most writers don’t come near what she does in presenting a viewpoint and then unpicking all the questions around it. “The Mother of All Questions” - on not being a mother - is fascinating. And whether Solnit writes about walking or gender, there is such incision, and often humour, in how she circles a subject before moving in to directly address it. “Men Explain Lolita To Me” explores feminist responses to art, and how women’s opinions are often challenged.
After the murders in a Charleston church earlier this year, Claudia Rankin wrote this really affecting piece, about colour and identity,“The Condition of Black Life Is One of Mourning”. I’ve only read sections of her award-winning Citizen: An American Lyric, but I’m looking forward to reading the whole thing.
I read many short stories over the course of the year and particularly liked Lauren Groff’s lonely tale of neighbourhood night-walking, “Ghosts and Empties”. Rachel Kushner is a writer of huge talent and ability, with a particular gift for voice. It’s been a while since her excellent novel The Flamethrowers, so I was glad to see “Fifty-Seven” show up in The New Yorker.
If you’re a short story fan, and feel like self-gifting, buy both volumes of the gorgeous cloth-bound Penguin Book of the British Short Story (ed. Philip Hensher). Arranged chronologically, there are classic writers like HG Wells, DH Lawrence and Saki, and in Volume one I discovered lost working class men like T. Baron Russell and Jack Common that deal with male identity. There’s also a devastating story by Leslie Halward called “Old Sweat” in Volume 2 about the effect of shellshock. Volume 2 includes more recent work from Sylvia Townsend Warner, JG Ballard and Doris Lessing and ends with Zadie Smith. One of the highlights is Alan Sillitoe’s eerie “Mimic”.
And the perfect medium for essays, short stories (and interviews) is Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith’s wonderful Winter Pages. I’m still working through the “arts annual for grown-ups” and am saving the fiction and interviews for over Christmas. but there are some stand-out essays: Claire Kilroy on the pull between motherhood and writing, Mark O'Connell on a young priest working in disadvantaged part of Dublin, and Lia Mills’s unflinching essay on her mother’s dementia.
