Best of 2019 reading list

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Written By Banshee Lit
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We asked our contributors and editors to share their favourite reads of the year, with a focus on short pieces: 

Chris Beausang (fiction, issue #9)

In 2019 I liked in no particular order:

  1. James Tates’ prose poem ‘Goodtime Jesus’ available here for some reason, otherwise available in Jeremy Noel-Tod’s newish Penguin Book of the Prose Poem.

  2. ‘Procedure’ by D.M. Lynch in Minor Literature[s].

  3. Édourard Louis’ ’The Pain Never Went Away’ in the New York Review of Books.

Laura Cassidy (editor)

No one writes about the interplay of music and emotion quite like Hanif Abdurraqib, so predictably I loved his 2019 Paris Review column, Notes on Pop, especially the June offering ‘On Summer Crushing’.

It’s tempting to list everything from the summer issue of The Stinging Fly, but I’ll stick to the breathtaking ‘Small Yellow Spider’ from featured poet Dean Browne. 

And Kelly Link’s Advice to Debut Authors was priceless.   

Natalie Crick (poetry, issue #8)

In 2019 I indulged in reading countless beautiful, unforgettable poems. Choosing three favourites was difficult, but a special trio I re-read and re-read, wishing they were mine, were:

  • ’father’s last escape’ by A. K . Blakemore (Poetry, September 2019)

  • ’You’ by Amelia Loulli (Primers Volume 4, Nine Arches Press, May 2019).

  • ’Steve’ by Rachel Long (Mal, a journal of sexuality and erotics, October 2019)

Danny Denton (non-fiction, issue #9)

Leaving out the many wonderful pieces we published in The Stinging Fly this year, I was blown away by the following: 

Aude’s short story ‘Clothilde 1’ (translated by Cristy Stiles). From The Lifted Brow Issue #43.

Aude is a seemingly forgotten French-language writer from Quebec in the 70s, returned to print in English by Cristy Stiles in The Lifted Brow this year. This story about a woman who tries to block her ears is weird and visceral and immediate and dream-like and just fucking brilliant.

Niamh Campbell’s essay 'Ideogram’. From The Tangerine, Issue #8

Brilliantly structured, and dazzling in its ability to be cold & distant & theoretical in one sentence, then suddenly very personal in the next. Memorable for this brilliant idea alone: 'Minor architecture, like minor literature, is not that which challenges the major and mainstream overtly, but that which resides within the major queerly, weirdly–tunnelling, twisting, undermining, complicating–and finding places for anarchic expression or difference…’

Ingrid Casey’s poem 'Orson and Akira’. From Banshee, Issue #8

I absolutely loved the freedom and madness and yet the deep sincerity of this wonderful piece.

I would attempt to find links for the three pieces but actually all of these magazines can be bought for around or less than ten euro and so wherever possible should be bought.

Supriya Kaur Dhaliwal (poetry, issue #9)

‘Shatabdi Express’ by Navtej Dhillon (n+1, September 2019)

I’ve often failed terribly whenever I’ve tried to write about the land of my ancestors but reading Navtej Dhillon’s story in n+1, I felt like his Punjab is my Punjab. 

‘Your tongue is still yours’ by Dur e Aziz Amna (Financial Times, November 2019)

Dur e Aziz Amna’s essay ‘Your tongue is still yours’ won the 2019 Bodley Head/Financial Times Essay Prize and is a beautiful meditation on language—on Potohari Punjabi, on Sindhi and Wakhi, Coke Studio and qawwali, on Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Agha Shahid Ali. This essay moved me like nothing else I’ve read the entire year. 

‘The Haircut’ by Aditya Bahl (Popula, March 2019)

Aditya Bahl’s essay ‘The Haircut’ cuts through many borders of the different legacies we inhabit, spiritual or otherwise; faith, religion and identity. The essay begins with a scene of the author eating kadhai chicken and an extra naan at a Pakistani restaurant named Bismillah in Baltimore, a tradition carried out when the author misses his home. But it’s not about just about the food there, it’s about the solidarity that people who ate there, especially bearded men, shared. Any immigrant or an expat will quickly relate to an incident like this. Further on, there’s a scene of the author praying at a mosque while being a Hindu and being enrolled in a madrassa by his Mom. It’s breathtakingly beautiful. It reminds me of an India I miss every day. 

Marie Gethins (flash fiction, issue #9)

This year, I’m all about flash. There was a plethora of excellent work in 2019 and tough to cull it to just three, but these pieces have staying power for me. The luminary Anne Enright proved that she is just as stunning in a short space as in the longer forms with ’The Weight’ in The New Yorker’s summer flash series. She takes a situation perhaps we all fear and spins out a fragment of time to reveal truths about the fragility of human relationships – longstanding and fleeting. 

Elisabeth Ingram Wallace is a dazzling talent and I was tempted to list her a few times, but her ’Liquid History’ published by SmokeLong Quarterly is a particular standout with its creative use of time, language and perspective. 

One of the toughest flash categories to my mind is the micro and I am all admiration for ’The Ghost of a Very Small Thing’ by the fantastic Cathy Ulrich published on the fresh, new venue Lunate. In under 150 words she had my heart twisted and wringing.  

Erin Halliday (poetry, issue #9)

It has to be Gail McConnell’s 'Untitled / Villanelle’ from The Poetry Review, after Gail launching her pamphlet 'Fothermather’ last night in Belfast.

Claire Hennessy (editor)

This article by Hanna Jameson in the Irish Times at the beginning of this year had me nodding furiously along to every paragraph. It’s about making art, and mental health, and material reality, and that ugly truth that although money can’t buy happiness, it can, actually. It does. And then she talks about 'resilience’, which is a word that makes me eye-roll, like 'mindfulness’ - not because I don’t get why they are important but because they are buzzwords so often trotted out in lieu of necessary professional supports, and while we’re at it a fairer society, and because they put the onus on someone in pain to fix themselves. Jameson writes, “While resilience to negative situations is essential to survival, as is the development of healthy coping mechanisms, many of us have already cultivated more resilience than should be necessary in any society that calls itself civilised.” I mean. Dude! 

Elizabeth Gilbert, who I know is a bit of a love-hate figure for creative types (I am Team Liz all the way), wrote this furious/grateful poem about her hysterectomy, which I loved but was also fascinated by the responses it received - both an outpouring of support from women and a fair bit of tut-tutting and disapproval. Whenever hysterectomies come up in fiction, they are a sad thing, a loss, or at the very very least a necessary evil; the idea that they might be celebrated (even if someone has not already had children and allowed their uterus fulfil its purpose, or whatever) is so alien. Gilbert asks, what if you never wanted the damn thing in the first place? “What if you never wanted this fist of muscle and fiber; this ardent crucible shaped like the head of a bull; this blood-drenched and primal intelligence that hordes and drains your essence forever, with only one purpose: to forge life from your loins?”

Finally, Mary Gaitskill’s novella, This Is Pleasure, published in The New Yorker, looks at #MeToo and the publishing industry with nuance and grace. It is a skilful reminder of how fiction gets to be messy and complicated, and how it should be; it is not journalism or one of Aesop’s fables. “Grotesque, but at the same time paired with such peculiar, delectating joy,” as one of its two narrators reflect. These characters feel real and stay with you, curled around your brain.  

Eleanor Hooker (poetry, issue #9)

Vertigo & Ghost by Fiona Benson (Jonathan Cape) tackles difficult and deeply unsettling themes, without sacrificing the subtlety of the lyric. In the first half of her book, Benson reimagines Greek mythology to cast Zeus as a modern day sexual predator, to chilling and relentless effect. In the second half, she presents poems about mental ill health, parenting and relationships with extraordinary clarity and truth. 

Kevin Barry’s Night Boat to Tangier (Canongate Books) is a hybrid novel that balances prose, poetry and humour in a story that matches the absurdity of Beckett with the sharpness and wit of Tarantino or the Coen Brothers, yet essentially with Barry’s unique style and freshness. Charlie and Maurice, the flawed anti-heroes of the story, trade wit and banter through superbly crafted dialogue that draws the reader in as their advocate.

Before Our Eyes: New and Selected Poems, 1975–2017 (Princeton University Press) by Eleanor Wilner gathers thirty-four new poems and a selection of poems from her previous seven collections. Wilner’s poetry is enduring. I love her control of the lyric and the long line. This book features one of my all time favourite poems ‘The Girl with Bees in Her Hair’.

Chris Newlove Horton (fiction, issue #8)

1) Short story: ‘Show Them a Good Time’ by Nicole Flattery

From Show Them a Good Time (The Stinging Fly)

Paywalled here: https://stingingfly.org/2016/06/01/show-good-time/

Awful fun. 

2) Short story: ‘The Fellow’ by Joy Williams

From: The New Yorker (Sep 23 2019)

Available here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/09/30/the-fellow

A welcome addition to the canon of stories starring dogs that can talk.

3) Poem: ‘Untitled’ by Sophie Collins

From: Who Is Mary Sue? (Faber & Faber)

Pretty perfect, and with a pair of em dashes to die for. 

Dearbhaile Houston (flash fiction, issue #9)

Perhaps because I spend most of my time reading and thinking about fiction, my favourite short pieces this year are all good, palate-cleansing essays: 

Jen Jabaily-Blackburn (poetry, issue #9)

1.) Carrie Fountain’s “Will You?

"My children/are so young they cannot imagine a world/like the one they live in.” One of the most challenging things about reconciling my life as a poet and my life as a parent is that I have a heavy sense of having a trained eye which won’t let slip the psychic weight of the things my child does– how she hasn’t yet learned the complexities of expressing affection, or doesn’t yet harbor lasting annoyances (oh Lord, glitter), or even think to hold on to pain or damage. I love that Fountain’s poem doesn’t look for an answer.

2.) Locusts by Ruth Madievsky (orginally published in The Kenyon Review)

This brilliant, weird dreamworld right here. One of my favorite things I read all year. I showed it to my (non-poet) husband after I puzzled over the final lines a bit, and who was baffled (to say the least) that I was worried about the ownership of the skull on the nightstand rather than the fact of there being a skull on the nightstand at all (details.)

3.) Ada Limón on Commonplace Books

I work at the Poetry Center at Smith College, which is a bit of a dream job in that we have world-class poets coming around every couple of weeks during the semesters. During one of our Q&As, Limón talked about the decision to pull her poem “Mastering” from consideration at a publication that wanted her to blunt its harshness (she 100% made the right call in keeping the brilliant poem as is.) and I was so happy to hear her talk about this again during her conversation with Rachel Zucker on Commonplace Books (so I don’t have to do a terrible secondhand recounting of her very good advice anymore.) 

Rosa Jones (poetry, issue #9)

Louise Kennedy (fiction, issue #8)

E.R. Murray’s ‘Appetite’ in Banshee Issue 8 was the best short anything I read all year, for reasons too numerous to list. Suffice it to say the last part, entitled Water, nearly killed me. Just read it. 

 In July I read Mike Jay’s ‘Riot, Revolt, Revolution’ in the London Review of Books (Vol. 41, No.14), a review of Peter Linebaugh’s Red Round Globe Hot Burning: A Tale at the Crossroads of Commons and Culture, of Love and Terror, of Race and Class and of Kate and Ned Despard. For the likes of me, too thick and skittish to read such a book, the very title of which I find exhausting, Jay’s review was perfect. It introduced me to Edward Despard, whose life began in Mountrath, Co. Laois in 1751 and ended by public execution on charges of sedition in London in 1803, and his wife and collaborator Catherine, a free woman of colour from Kingston, Jamaica. Extraordinary stuff. 

Wes Lee (poetry, issue #8)

'Electric Snakes #14’ by Adrian C. Louis from his collectionElectric Snakes(University of Nebraska Press, 2018). A Lovelock Paiute writer from Nevada who died last September. Author of 13 poetry collections, Electric Snakes is his last. Intensely moving, unsparingly honest, darkly funny, I felt a terrible sense of finality reading these last verses.

'An Epidemic of Disbelief’ by Barbara Bradley Hagerty in The Atlantic. A harrowing, long form essay exposing the practice of shelving untested rape kits throughout the US, and as a consequence of this, police departments have failed to make links between rape victims to identify serial rapists.

'The U. S. federal government estimates that police departments have warehoused more than 200,000 untested rape kits. But no one really knows, because cities and states fight to keep those numbers secret.’ — Barbara Bradley Hagerty

'More than one man has reached up my skirt’ by Natalie Scenters-Zapico, from her latest collection Lima :: Limón (Copper Canyon Press, 2019). I love the energy and brio of this poem and this visceral, unflinching collection. Natalie Scenters-Zapico is a fronteriza from the sister cities of El Paso, Texas, and Cd. Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico.

Mícheál McCann (poetry, issue #8)

‘Pause’ by Mary Ruefle (Granta 131: The Map is Not Territory)

“A kind of wild forest blood runs in your veins.” An unhesitant, panoramic perspective on the historical, and contemporary associations of the female menopause. Ruefle in equal turns terrifies and disarms. This essay will take your breath.

‘Magdalene and the Seven Devils’ by Marie Howe (W.W. Norton & Company)

“The first was that I was very busy.

The second–I was different from you: whatever happened to you could

not happen to me, not like that.”

Magdalene (2017) is a stirring volume of poems written as the voice of a contemporary Mary Magdalene figure. Famously, Marie Howe’s poems were described as being ‘stripped of metaphor’, and these poems resonate, at least partly, with this; poems in this book end in plain, unbearably real description. Howe said in interview that we use metaphor to describe, to speak, because enduring the real thing hurts us, and is almost unbearable.

‘A Morning Person’ by Mary Ruefle (The Poetry Review, Vol 109, No 2, Summer 2019) 

“I think flowers enjoy their solitude

in the early dawn before the buzz begins.

I think sprinklers annoy them.”

From Ruefle’s new book Dunce (2019): here Ruefle, somehow (through parataxis) makes a fragmented, vividly distinctive group of images coalesce into a poem that belongs to a writer trying to write, and the self-loathing that, on occasion, comes along with that. The ending of this poem has lingered in my imagination for months. 

[individual poems are to be savoured, but rest assured that the experience of reading these poems in their fullness within the collections situates them in their wholeness: local booksellers have copies of both!]

E.R. Murray (non-fiction, issue #8)

I loved ‘Montparnasse’ by Lucy Sweeney Byrne in her debut collection, Paris Syndrome. It’s astute, wry, and incredibly funny. Set in a Parisian graveyard, we experience the protagonist’s excruciating inability to feel what she expected, or is expected of her, at Sartre’s grave. Cringe-worthy in its realness, it digs deep into the human psyche.

There were two poems that stopped me in my tracks in Correspondences, an anthology to call for an end to direct provision. The first was the opening poem, Mother Tongue, by Mimmie Malaba, which is masterful, beautiful, and haunting. The second was ‘For Marwa’ by Claire Hennessy, a thought-provoking piece that speaks volumes about kindness, permission, and the right to create. 

And my final selection is ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Jaloux’ by Nuala O’Connor, over on Tiny Essays. This compact non-fiction piece is brutally honest and full of pain, yet at the same time, empowering and gorgeous. 

Cliona O’Connell (poetry, issue #8)

I was privileged to be able to spend a week at the John Hewitt International Summer School in July where the quality of political and literary discussion was extraordinary, one highlight being a Fiona Benson and Mary Jean Chan double-bill. Benson read from her Forward Prize winning collectionVertigo and Ghostwhich deals unsparingly with issues around #metoo and motherhood. Mary Jean Chan read from her debut collection Fleche, a book that talks of the difficulties of daughterhood and queerness but is, most of all, a big blue book of tenderness. 

The US poet Ada Limon (ofHow to Triumph Like a Girl fame) published her collection The Carrying on this side of the pond earlier in the year. Her poem ‘The Leash’ is one which proves that in the dark times, there will also be singing. 

Back home, I’ve been cherishing poems from the new collections: Harry Clifton’s Herod’s Dispensations, Jane Clarke’s When the Tree Fallsand Vona Groarke’s Double Negative.

Essay-wise, Polly Waterfield’s Extinction Rebellion story ‘Bones’ in Channel Issue 1 flies the flag for introverted activists everywhere and reminds us that “every fragment of carefree companionship is radical.” 

Nuala O’Connor (flash fiction, issue #8)

Historical flash fiction has finally got a spotlight in the form of online journal FlashBack Fiction. There’s lots of great flash published in it, but one that leapt out at me this year was Jude Higgins’s ‘Wolf Moon’. In a glorious meld of menace and robust language, a woman protects her husband’s pride when hungry wolves threaten to destroy their world. You can read it here. 

I will also shamelessly promote a piece from the first issue of Splonk, the new online flash journal I edit. We receive more great flash than we can publish, but our editorial team loves attention to language and the elliptical quality that’s the hallmark of accomplished flash. We have a micro section (flash up to 100 words) and we get fewer of those because, I think, writers find them trickier than longer flash. One fabulous one we published was ‘Ghost Grapes’ by Sarah Freligh which you can read here. 

Eimear Ryan (editor)

Tadhg Coakley’s ‘Five Moments In Sport’ in The Stinging Fly, summer 2019, is incredibly moving from its very first line: ‘I have only one memory of my father kissing me.’ Like all great sports writing it’s really about other things – masculinity, community, loss.

‘I told my boss as soon as I started leaving the button at the back of my skirt undone. I assured him that nothing would change.’ Dominique Cleary’s 'Advice on Motherhood’ (The Dublin Review 72) was technically published in autumn 2018, but it appeared online this year, which I am using as an excuse to include it, because it’s brilliant – simmering with humour, intelligence & anger.

In a year full of eloquent exposés (that Caroline Calloway piece!), I still think all the time about Ian Parker’s stranger-than-fiction account of author Dan Mallory’s Ripley-esque history of elaborate lies and manipulations in the New Yorker: ‘A suspense novelist’s trail of deceptions’

Ronan Ryan (fiction, issue #9)

Brian Turner’s meditation on grief and the preservation of music ‘In the Studio: Making Music Beyond the Digital Code’ in The Well Review (Issue 3/Volume I) is touching and profound, and, in the same issue, Eleanor Hooker’s poem ‘L’Appel du Vide’ is haunting, in a good way.

‘The Ballad of Sparrow Foot’ and ‘The Church of the Living God and Rescue Home for Divine Orphans’ are favourites of mine from Floridian writer Kimberly Lojewski’s collection of twisted fairy tales with heart, Worm Fiddling Nocturne in the Key of a Broken Heart (Burrow Press).

 I was riveted by Douglas Preston’s essay ‘The Day the Dinosaurs Died’ in The New Yorker, in no small part because I’m an easy mark for anything to do with dinosaurs and paleontologists – surely everyone is?

Jeanne Sutton (fiction, issue #9)

I was in the final year of a masters this year, so my recreational reading was far too slim for my liking. Here are the essays which fascinated and upset me:

A woman recounts her son’s struggle with food and the therapy her family sought for him.

A superstar doctor gets caught out. This is a chilling story about male arrogance and how the pursuit for justice is placed on victim’s shoulders. 

Living in a world centred around being capitalism’s handmaidens had made us unhappy, lonely and disenfranchised. 

Mary Ellen Talley (poetry, issue #8)

Poem 1: Small Kindnesses by Danusha Lameris. It is also on www.slowdownshow.org

Poem 2: Words to Use with Caution by Ingrid Wendt 

Poem 3: Miss Sahar Listens to Fairuz Sing “The Bees’ Path” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. (Lena may have other poems I love too but I found this with the link.) The poem was originally in Greensboro Review Spring 2019 but this link is to the poem in Poetry Daily.

Anne Tannam (poetry, issue #8)

Three of my favourite short pieces for the year are:

  • ’The Carpet with the Big Pink Roses on It’ from the short story collection The Springs of Affection by Maeve Brennan (The Stinging Fly 2016)

  • ’No, Kayne, it’s not LIKE we’re mentally in prison’ by Erica Dawson, chosen by The Academy of American Poets as their Poem of the Day

  • ‘Foley and the Wolf’ from the short story collection Paris Syndrome by Lucy Sweeney Byrne (Banshee Press 2019)

David Toms (poetry, issue #8)

Living outside of Ireland means I’m often lagging behind slightly in the reading stakes. For instance, it was only this past September I picked up Jessica Traynor’s The Quick published by Dedalus Press from Books Upstairs while passing through Dublin. It’s a brilliant collection, with some haunting poems, a collection to come back to again and again.

From the summer 2019 issue of The Stinging Fly Ian Maleney’s piece “Going Clear” on the Dublin Horse Show was a brilliant example of what writing about sport can be like if given the chance.

One of the best collections of poetry I’ve read in the past year is Sonje Nyegaard’s Mørket er et Mirakel (The Darkness is a Miracle) from Kolon Forlag. You can read some translations of her poems into English as part of Kolon Forlag’s New Norwegian Poetry anthology (produced for the Frankfurt Bookfair) here  (pages 111-119).

Leah Umansky (poetry, issue #9)

Three of my favorite online pieces from 2019 are as follows and my god was it hard to choose: 

The Ours Poetica Project links poetry and video and it is one of my favorite parts of 2019. As a poet, I’m always looking for ways to make poetry more accessible to others and to find a way to sort of break the stigma people often face with poetry:  I don’t get it, it’s too hard, it’s not for me, etc… I love this poetry project because it breaks all those hesitations and excuses. It is enjoyable, and exciting! I look forward to each new episode and encourage people to sign up on You Tube or follow the project on Twitter. It was created by my friend, the poet Paige Lewis, The Poetry Foundation, and John Green’s company Complexly. There are so many favorites and so many are still forthcoming, but  one of my favorites so far this year was Tiana Clark reading her poem ‘BBHMM’, responding to Rihanna’s music video for ‘Bitch Better Have My Money’. I love how this poem is both visually on the page, and aurally. Tiana is one of my favorite poets, and of course I love the way her poem is inspired by Rihanna. Pop culture is such a good vehicle for poetry, and I know I’m a bit biased in saying that. 

My second choice breaks the rules a bit. It’s not a poem, essay, flash fiction or short story, (sorry), but a cartoon from The New Yorker. I think about this cartoon all the time, and though it makes me laugh, it sadly gets at the heart of the world we are now living in – tyranny, egotism and toxic masculinity. 

My third choice is a poem I read and heard quite recently, over at an online journal I love, SWWIM. It’s called “After Observing the Mummy with My Students at the Museum” by Donna Vorreyer. I read with Donna last month in Chicago and loved this poem for its tenderness and its imagery. It stayed with me long after the reading, and then I saw it online a week or so afterwards. I love the way the speaker is both teacher, daughter, and poet all in one. Donna and I are both secondary education teachers and this poem really resonated with me. We spend so much of our days, as teachers, hoping to inspire others, (sometimes it actually works) but when our teaching actually inspires us and finds a way into our own poems, that’s quite an achievement!

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