Best of 2017 reading list

We asked some of our 2017 contributors and editors to share their favourite short pieces of the year: 

E. Kristin Anderson

The poem that really hit me in the chest this year is ‘Poet Wrestling with the Fruit’ by Rosebud Ben-Oni in BOAAT. 

I loved ‘One’, a work of fiction where men start disappearing by Kolleen Carney in Rabid Oak.  

And this article about the sexualization of Sylvia Plath in the Guardian by Cathleen Allyn Conway is lovely.

Marni Appleton

I really loved ‘Year of the Body’ by Sophie Mackintosh (Funhouse Magazine), a very short piece about the physicality of depression. I’ve been a fan of Sophie’s writing for a while now. Her fiction is often slightly dystopian in setting but extremely emotionally resonant. I’ve also been lucky enough to read a proof of her forthcoming novel The Water Cure (Hamish Hamilton), which I finished in a day. It was so good.

I also adored ‘Los Angeles’ by Emma Cline, which was published in Granta 139. Her writing is so clever and understated. I’ve returned to this story often.

Finally, one of my absolute favourites of the year is ‘Bottle Man’ by Nicole Flattery, published in the Irish Times, a deeply unsettling piece of fiction about abuse.

On the non-fiction side, I’d like to give a shout out if I may to ‘How To Edit Your Own Lousy Writing’ by Julian Gough, which appeared in The Stinging Fly. It’s just brilliant – all writers should read it!

Amanda Bell

‘The Boatman’ by Carolyn Forché in Poetry.

'In Two Seconds’ by Mark Doty in American Poetry Review.

]Both of the above I heard read by the poets themselves at the Munster Literature Festival in February, and both made me weep, for their outrage and for the hope they gave me that poetry can make a difference.

Helen Dunmore’s death poem, 'Hold out your arms’ in The Guardian.

Three sombre choices, but all poems which moved me deeply this strange year.

Ellen Brickley

My biggest stand-out read of the year is Danielle Geller’s essay in the New Yorker, 'Annotating the First Page of the First Navajo-English Dictionary.’

Laura Cassidy

‘How to Replace a Ghost’ by Alana Massey in Longreads.

‘Mimi O’Donnell Reflects on the Loss of Philip Seymour Hoffman and the Devastation of Addiction’ in Vogue.

‘End Days’ by Nicole Flattery in Dublin Review 68.

Colin Graham

The best book I read in 2017 was published in 2016 – Svetlana Alexievich’s Secondhand Time (Fitzcarraldo) is an extraordinary compendium of testimonies and accounts of the chaos of post-Soviet Russia.

I was lucky enough to take the spectacular train journey from Oslo to Bergen a couple of years ago. Kevin Breathnach’s essay ‘Tunnel Vision’ in The Dublin Review 67 is even better than the journey itself.

And my favourite poetry book of the year, in a year of much excellent poetry, is Leontia Flynn’s The Radio (Jonathan Cape), a brilliant expansion of her voice – sharp and funny and vivid.

Richard Hawtree

This year I’ve relished the supple transpositions of medieval Welsh tradition offered by Matthew Francis in his splendid poetry collection The Mabinogi (Faber & Faber). The scintillating range of the French poet Robert Desnos, who died at the Terezin death-camp in June 1945, is superbly captured in a new translation by Timothy Adès, Robert Desnos: Surrealist, Lover, Resistant (Arc). I would also recommend the Franco-Arabic work of the Syrian-born poet Maram al-Masri. Two of her most forceful poems, translated by Theo Dorgan, appear alongside an interview with Sarah Byrne in issue 1 of The Well Review.

Julianna Holland

This year I was struck by the gifts of both an emerging and a truly established writer. Una Mannion was the deserving Hennessy Literary Award Emerging Poetry Winner with 'Crouched Burial’ – teachings of a fundamental love story.

And Tess Gallagher, who makes us think differently about everything, with ‘Cloud Path’, published by The New Yorker.

If Banshee is included, I would add 'Lake Vigil’ by Clare O'Dea.

Claire Hennessy

‘What We Talk About When We Talk About Housing’ by Danielle McLaughlin in The Stinging Fly.

‘I’m Diana from Anne of Green Gables and I am Fucking Drunk’ by Zoe Daniels in McSweeney’s.

‘It’s Still Complicated: Romance Publishing’ by Betsy O’Donovan in Publishers Weekly.

Kelly Konya

A new discovery: the book Flâneuse: Women Walk the City in Paris, New York, Tokyo, Venice, and London by Lauren Elkin has left me with plenty of thoughtful considerations about city-living. It’s the perfect combo of personal narratives, poetic writing, and academic exploration—the best kind of nonfiction.

An old-new favorite: anything by Jo Ann Beard, but in particular, her collection of brilliant essays titled The Boys of My Youth. You’ll know why I return to this book time and again after reading the lucky-number-seventh piece, ’The Fourth State of Matter’. Just brilliant.

A thought-provoker: I never wanted to think about the future in this way, but now I can’t get AI out of my head. To Be a Machine: Adventures Among Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists Solving the Modest Problem of Death by Mark O’Connell is funny, frightening, and made me think twice about how we are—already—making ourselves into mini machines.

Shaun Lavelle

Michael Hobbes’ article ’Together Alone: the Epidemic of Gay Loneliness’ (Huffington Post) is a difficult read about issues gay people have with intimacy and addiction. It prompted lot of email chains and soul-searching among friends and me. 

I spend a lot of time when I should be working reading 'Modern Love’ articles in the New York Times. Marisa Lascher’s ’Single, Unemployed and Suddenly Myself’ has impressive self-awareness combined with raw vulnerability.

Lisa McInerney’s ’Tech House’ (Stinging Fly) is an unusual, fast-paced treasure of a story. 

Niall McArdle

Since returning to Ireland last year after being away for many years, I have been trying to include more Irish writers in my reading, so inevitably it feels like I’m playing catch-up. In any event, I’m always late to the party, so I spent much of 2017 reading work from 2016 or earlier. I did manage to make room in for some wonderful stuff from this year: on the story front, June Caldwell’s Room
Little Darker (New Island), Nuala O’Connor’s Joyride to Jupiter (New Island), and Martin Malone’s This Cruel Station (Doire Press) spring to mind, while Pat Boran’s A Man Is Only As Good … (Dedalus Press), David Butler’s All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press), and Paul Maddern’s Pilgrimage (Templar Poetry) and are all exceptional poetry collections.

I am drawn again and again to a short, sharp poem by Stephanie Conn, ‘Contusion’ in The Woman on the Other Side (Doire Press 2016), a collection filled with bittersweet observations of the everyday and which highlights how seemingly mundane events can illuminate – or tear asunder – whole lives.
‘Contusion’ is of course about a bruise and so much more, ‘the iridescent patch/ of pearly white on tanned skin’, a skin which ‘knows too much’.

Kerrie O’Brien’s stunning debut Illuminate (Salmon 2016) is filled with art and artists, beauty and death. In ‘Rothko’, the painter’s suicide is presented with a stark, matter-of- fact opener: ‘They found him/ Hunched over a/ White sink/ All his beauty let out.’

Eugene O’Connell and Pat Boran’s The Deep Heart’s Core (Dedalus Press 2017) is an indispensable work for anyone interested in what it is to write, exploring as it does the creative impetus behind poetry. A hundred Irish poets have chosen their favourite or key poem, and written a short essay on why and how they went about writing it. To pick only one from this is daunting and unfair, so I’ll cop out and choose the piece by the editor. Pat Boran’s ‘Waving’ (‘I saw the world disappear into a funnel/ of perspective, like the reflection in a bath/ sucked into a single point when the water drains) is, according to Boran, ‘a reminder to the poet in me that when I am most in control I may not be at my most perceptive, and vice-versa.’

Nuala O’Connor

What peculiar little planets flash stories are – they orbit the solid world of novels (and the more nebulous world of the short story) in a way that confounds some and delights others. I’m in Camp Delight – I love nothing more than a quirky, language-attentive, amorphous flash piece, something that gets my eyes greening and my heart babumfing.

This year, Kathy Fish, Mary Ruefle and Leanne Radojkovich did both those things to me with a pair of insightful, raw pieces. Kathy’s flash ‘Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild’ (Jellyfish Review) needs no intro or explanation, it just needs to be read.

Mary Ruefle is my new writing crush – I love her passionate, sardonic work and its hybrid qualities. Is it fiction, is it poetry, is it prose-poetry? Who cares? Her piece ‘Pause’ is the best, most honest thing I’ve read about the menopause. I read it in her collection My Private Property, but it’s also online at Granta.

I instantly loved the flash ‘First fox’ by New Zealand writer Leanne Radojkovich. She creates a perfect world of wonder and it’s one I now teach to show students what can be done in a tiny space.

Maeve O’Lynn

All of the stories in the comprehensive and beautifully presented Female Lines anthology (New Island), edited by Linda Anderson and Dawn Sherratt-Bado, but in particular 'Locksmiths’ by Wendy Erskine. Sparse in style, rich in nuance, heavy with the unspoken - I can’t wait to read her new collection next year. You can read 'Locksmiths’ on the Irish Times website.

Also, the Novemberance blog by Nina MacLaughlin for The Paris Review has been a dark treasure trove of ghostly imaginings during the darkest month of the year.

And finally, a big shout out for Hollie McNish’s latest collection, Plum (Picador). Playful, by turns experimental, unflinching, funny: McNish is so adept at articulating all of different strands of her experiences with work, motherhood, friendship and life.

Elizabeth O’Neill

‘Clown School’ by Nuar Alsadir in Granta 140. 

‘The History of Photography Is a history of Shattered Glass’ by Teju Cole in the New York Times.

Maggie Nelson’s republished meditation on blue, Bluets (Jonathan Cape).

Cathy Thomas

Hump by Nicole Flattery (The Stinging Fly) made me laugh so much that I missed my train stop on the commute to work. It’s wry, bizarre, a fable of Gogolian proportions – and the opening sequence summed up my feelings towards working in offices (needless to say, I work in an office).

I doubt I’ll be the only person to recommend Sinéad Gleeson’s extraordinary essay on dementia, ‘Second Mother’ (Granta). It’s exactly the sort of thing that I wish I could write about my grandmother, except I couldn’t, not in a way that is both full of feeling and strikingly unsentimental. This is the sort of essay I can imagine needing to re-read and re-read in the years to come.

A friend recently introduced me to Jessie Greengrass’ short stories, An Account of the Decline of the Greak Auk from One Who Saw It (John Murray), and the title story from the collection is astonishing – I can’t think of another story quite like it. Although it’s not available to read online, you can hear the author read another piece from her collection in this excellent episode of LiteraryFriction podcast (another happy 2017 discovery for me).

David Toms

Picking just three books makes this incredibly tough work, but I think in terms of poetry it’s hard to look beyond Trevor Joyce’s Fastness, published by Miami University Press. Fastness is his translation of Edmund Spenser’s Mutability cantos into modern English. It’s the poetry event of 2017 for me. The best set of essays I’ve rifled through this year were Karl Ove Knausgård’s Autumn, published in English by Penguin. If you know him from his My Struggle series, then you’ll love this. The first in a cycle of essays organised around the seasons, it comes with beautiful artwork by Vanessa Baird. Sticking with essays, Brian Dillon’s Essayism from Fitzcarraldo Editions, is a book that anyone who loves essays, or the idea and form of the essay. An absolute must.

Lydia Unsworth

I loved this one by Kate Feld. It’s called ‘Back 40′, and is in The Honest Ulsterman.

Sophie van Llewyn

Kathy Fish, ‘Collective Nouns for Humans in the Wild’ in Jellyfish Review. This very short piece (a hybrid? a prose poem? a mini-essay? I don’t think it matters what you wish to call it) has the effect of a volcano eruption. I can’t find a between way to describe that explosion of feelings it awakes within the reader.  

Stephanie Hutton, ‘Left-Overs in Spelk’. This is a piece you just want to read and reread. The language is rich, poetic ('I search for something that would poke a memory’), and that magical twist gives you butterflies in the stomach. Yes, the world can and should be a better place.  

Faith Merino, ‘In the Orchard’ in The Moth issue 30. What pulled me in was the Gabriel Garcia Marquez-esque whiff of the piece. What kept me reading was the incredible tension and the unbelievable psychological depth. This is just fantastic storytelling, plain and simple.