Best of 2018 reading list
We asked some of our 2018 contributors and editors to share their favourite short pieces of the year:
Carol Ballantine
The 8th referendum produced some amazing writing. In spite of all our greatest writers weighing in on the subject, my standout favourite was ‘The Labour of Legal Change: On the Final Days of the Irish Pro-Choice Referendum’ by Mairead Enright on Critical Legal Thinking blog - a raw personal report from the frontline that captures all the complication and the huge emotion of the repeal campaign.
‘Silently the Women Waited’ stopped me in my tracks when I read it. It’s by Banshee’s contributor Angela Carr, in the awesome Autonomy anthology, reproduced here.
My final piece is a story from Melatu Uche Ochorie’s beautiful and arresting collection This Hostel Life: Under the Awning. In it, African women in a suburban Irish home discuss Irish culture acerbically and insightfully. It is high time the tables were turned on Irish solipsism, and Ochorie does so marvellously.
Angela Carr
‘The Republic of Motherhood’ - Liz Berry (Granta, Aug 1017)
This nomination is as much for the pamphlet - a series of small pieces - as for the title poem. Liz Berry is probably an obvious choice but I’ve been in love with her writing for years. When I read ‘The First Path’ from her collection 'Black Country’, it was a quasi-religious experience. Sometimes you come across a poem and even as you’re reading it, you hold your breath because you recognise that it’s doing something extraordinary and you’re afraid for it, the fragility of it, that it might fall before it reaches the other side. Poems as 'high-wire’ acts. I’ve only experienced a handful of these giddy, exhilarating encounters and two of them were with words written by Liz Berry. Everyone should read this pamphlet.
‘Texture’ - Maya Washington (The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2, Haymarket Books, 2018)
A fairly recent discovery as part of The Breakbeat Poets Vol. 2 anthology, there’s such tenderness in this poem, in the everyday world of a child growing and learning what it is to be female, and the far more loaded experience of becoming a black woman, the negotiating of different selves as expressed through the politics of hair.
‘Somewhere in america, a gun’ - torrin a. greathouse (Waxwing 14, Spring 2018)
One of the key choices we make as poets is the title we give a piece of work - it is a statement of intent, a declaration. I was glancing through Waxwing at the beginning of the year, a journal I hadn’t encountered before, and saw this title - it was like the ring of a bullet, its ricochet still hanging in the air, seeming to say everything about America right now. And then the poem itself heads off in a different direction initially, somewhere I didn’t expect it to go. It says the 'big thing’ but manages to surprise at every turn. I see she’s just won the Palette Poetry competition this week - a poet we’re going to be hearing a lot more from.
Laura Cassidy
John Patrick McHugh’s ‘The First Real Time’ (The Stinging Fly Issue 38/Volume 2) was perfect. I also loved Roisin Kiberd’s ‘The Night Gym’ (The Dublin Review No. 71) and Louise Nealon’s ‘The Possibility of Snow’ (The Irish Times).
James Clarke
Wendy Erskine - 77 Pop Facts
Wendy Erskine has chucked traditional ideas of form out of the back of the Ford Transit in this innovative tale of a cult rock musician, favouring a Rolling Stone-style profile that makes the story of Gil Courtney, long-faded but not forgotten, all the more authentic and revealing. For me, good fiction has an ache in the background, imagery that conjures a fuzzy stab of recognition; it tends to leave me with the feeling that the characters and me, we’ve got something in common now. By this measure 77 Pop Facts is bloody great. There’s a scene where the young Gil and his band are driving through the woods. They come upon the dancehall they’re playing at, lurching out of nowhere: this glowing beacon of youth and hope in the country…Reading it made my toes curl. It seemed like a perfect evocation of why we pursue the arts in the first place, despite the dead ends they can lead us into.
Phil Klay - Redeployment
This is the titular story from Phil Klay’s debut, which won the National Book Award over in the states the other year, which is pretty crazy when you think about it. Do you think a story collection could win the Booker Prize in the UK? Redeployment is about a marine, a fallen man managing to walk around and act normal, and it contains some of the most breakneck prose I’ve read. I’ve read it a few times now and it is yet to relinquish its hold on me. If someone had told me to picture a Marine serving in Dubya and Blair’s Iraq War before reading this story, what I came up with would have been far from sympathetic. Redeployment doesn’t ask for anything close to sympathy. It just asks you to understand what it was like to go to war and try to come back, and so you do.
Claire Vaye Watkins - I Love You but I’ve Chosen Darkness
This was in Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists issue last year, which I only got round to reading about a month or so ago, and I think it was by far the best thing in it. I don’t know how autobiographical the story is but it’s all about Clare Watkins dead ex: 'a white trash Ryan Phillippe’, a promiscuous high-school footballer with tattooed collarbones, eye shadow and the naive guts to live his short life how he wants. The language takes a little getting accustomed to but the reading experience becomes deeply immersive and the details are never anything less than acutely-observed and apposite. A swimming pool in town has gone 'mouth-warm’. A buried shipping container is 'stocked with supplies to wait out the days between y2k and the rapture’. This is a fine distillation of the first wave of Millenials’ teenage experience, and although the story is as American as it gets, it will probably resonate with UK and Irish readers if, like me, they grew up in the dial tone echo chamber of pre and post internet, if they had an address book they binned in favour of a mobile phone that they now spend too much time on.
Muireann Crowley
This year my reading has gravitated towards essays and other works of creative non-fiction.
So Mayer’s introductory essay ‘The Broken Open’ in the wonderful Spells: 21st Century Occult Poetry, edited by Sarah Shin and Rebecca Tamás.
Momtaza Mehri’s ‘On Noise & Networks’ on the potentials and limitations of networked feminisms post-#MeToo. (Though you should read all her columns at Open Space SFMOMA.)
Sandeep Parmar’s ‘An uncommon language’ on miscarriage and the language of grief in Poetry Review, Autumn 2018.
Keegan Dolan
My favourites were:
Dominique Cleary - 'Advice on Motherhood’ from 72 of The Dublin Review
Sally Rooney - 'An Irish Problem’ (Sally writing about the abortion referendum) in Voume 40, Number 10, 24 May 2018, London Review of Books.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa - 'Breastmilk and karma’ from 70 of The Dublin Review
Emma Flynn
Sophie Meehan’s Tinyletter. Every month the poet Sophie Meehan writes a Tinyletter for the first few days of her period. The result is always different, always enjoyable, sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always incredibly sensitive.
In March Caroline O'Donoghue wrote a hugely on the nose piece about That Nice Guy Online, which described the seemingly harmless but constant, and almost smothering, nature of how some men use social media to engage with women.
Kevin Barry’s The Coast of Leitrim from the New Yorker, which he read on the Writer’s Voice Podcast. Kevin Barry could talk or write about a bag of spuds and he’d make it something special and interesting.
Marie Gethins
Sarah Hall’s 'Sudden Traveller’ is my top pick–nominated for this year’s BBC National Short Story Award. I’ve been a massive fan of her work for years, but the quiet balance she achieves between devastation and renewal in this story, on several levels, is astounding. I was fortunate enough to hear her read part of it at the Charleston Small Wonder Festival in September. Wonderful to read, it’s even better heard.
Laura Gill
‘Elena Ferrante and The Condition of a Woman’s Body’ by Sue Rainsford, Ploughshares.
‘Three Poems’ by Mary Ruefle, Granta.
‘To a Duck in the Garden of Ninfa’ by Chelsea Hodson, Off Assignment.
SK Grout
I.S. Jones’ poem ‘A Field, Any Field’ in The Offing is a poem I go back to over and over again since reading in May, and always marvel at how it teaches me something new.
Lotte Lewis’ essay ‘The Possibilities of Poetry: On ‘Be With’ by Forrest Gander’ gave me so much to think about in terms of photography, ekphrasis and poetry.
Commonplace Podcast interview with Richard Siken is such a beautiful, unexpected gift from a poet that has defined my own writing.
Claire Hennessy
Much fine writing this year came out of the Repeal campaign, but I can’t face revisiting it just yet, so here are three emphatically-not-about-reproductive-rights recommendations:
- ‘Uiscebot’s Biography’ by Colm Keegan, from his collection Randomer (Salmon Poetry) - I love the energy of it.
- ‘When I indulge in envy, I envy everyone who has ever achieved anything, even things I achieved fifteen years ago.’ - one of the many gorgeous epigrams from Sarah Manguso’s 300 Arguments (Picador).
- ‘The Witch’s Love Song To Her Ex’ by Jessica Traynor, in her collection The Quick (Dedalus Press) - the playful darkness of it, oh!
Nick Holdstock
Ben Marcus’ story 'Stay Down and Take It’ in the New Yorker May 28 and Colin Fleming’s story 'Find the Edges’ in the April issue of Harper’s.
Sean Kenny
'Bird by Bird’ by Trisha McKinney in New Irish Writing.
“When he went to bed I switched phones. The password was easy. I read back over the text messages. Every word gentle and poetic.
He’s too nice that’s his problem. ‘Tame,’ is how the others described him.
Lame.”
‘Just Like Nicole’ by Laura Morgan in The Stinging Fly Issue 38 / Volume 2.
“He holds the packet out. She takes one and sits on the raised plant bed, crossing her legs so that the frayed denim of her cut-offs fringes her thigh. She tries to imagine her legs are nice legs. She closes her eyes. They are long and thin and tanned, like Nicole’s.”
'Stories For When You’re Older’ by Diarmuid Hickey in Banshee Issue #7
“His eyes were in a bad way. I hadn’t really seen them like that before. We’ve the same eyes. Everyone says. And my eyes have never been that way and his were normally not like that.”
Kelly Konya
A short story I shared with every reader I know: Haruki Murakami’s ‘The Wind Cave’ published in the New Yorker. This short piece is taken from Murakami’s latest novel, but still it is succinct in its exploration of the depths of emotional wounds and the way memory often prevents healing.
A poem I wish I had written: ‘Exiliados’ by Javier Zamora, featured in the NYT’s Sunday Edition. Native to El Salvador, Javier Zamora’s poetry is often subtly and gently gutting, and I felt this one’s jab long after reading it.
A work of literary journalism I didn’t want to end: ‘Something Like Springtime’ by Josh Roiland in Popula. At the center of this essay is honesty – honest people, music and storytelling. Like DFW reporting on the Maine Lobster Festival, Roiland unveils a portrait of Belfast, Maine that was formerly unknown and of The Modern Lovers’ Jonathan Richman, who became part of the small town’s lasting narrative.
Mary McGill
Maya Dusenbery’s book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick came out this year. I shared a long read she wrote about the topic on Twitter and the response basically makes the book’s premise for it. My favourite fiction book this year was Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation. An exploration of grief in a pre-9/11 New York, it is a lot more darkly funny than I’m making it sound. Lastly, John Lanchaster’s sublime short story Love Island which appeared in the LRB this year. Rather than mocking reality TV, Lanchester explores the subjectivity ‘splitting’ and complex emotionality that occurs when someone is watched all the time. Given the rise of surveillance culture, it’s a compassionate look at a very modern phenomenon.
Audrey Molloy
Louise Kennedy’s 'In Silhouette’ in Issue 6 of The Tangerine.
Kevin Power
Roisin Kiberd’s ‘The Night Gym’ (Dublin Review 71) was a beautiful hybrid of confessional essay and cultural analysis: one of the best things I read all year. For The New Yorker, Mark O’Connell wrote superbly about our collective online nightmare (‘The Deliberate Awfulness of Social Media’). In her report for The Guardian on the Conservative Party conference, Marina Hyde compared Theresa May to “a Quentin Blake drawing of an unravelling postmistress.” And if you think that’s good, wait till she gets to Boris Johnson.
Eimear Ryan
I loved Marissa Brostoff’s essay 'Missing Time’ in the spring issue of n+1 – about The X Files, communism, fanfic and intense adolescent friendships.
Danny Denton’s essay in Granta about seisiúns, 'Faltering Song’, is relatable, heartfelt & lovely as any party piece.
I was sorry to see the demise of Lenny letter this year. There was good stuff in every issue, like Geneva Abdul’s 'To Follow Your Dreams, You’ve Got to Bend the Rules’, a celebration of Bend it Like Beckham and the visibility it brought.
Anna Stockdale
We should all read and re-read this poetry that made me feel lots and lots:
SUGAH. LUMP. PRAYER by Momtaza Mehri, a chapbook published by Akashic Books.
Harm’s Way by Stevie Edwards, published by Underblong journal.
A Hurry of English by Mary Jean Chan, a pamphlet published by ignitionpress.
