2013: Reads of the Year - Calum Gardner

year in review 2013

2013: Reads of the Year – Calum Gardner

16 December 2013

Paula Meehan Dharmakaya (Carcarnet, 2000)

Seeing Meehan read at the StAnza poetry festival in St Andrews in March prompted me to investigate her work in more detail; a picture of contemporary Irish writing is really incomplete without her. The sequences “On Poetry” and “Suburb” from this collection are particularly impressive, showcasing her great formal and intellectual abilities as well as her observational and reflective powers.

Wayne Koestenbaum My 1980s and Other Essays (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2013)

I was in California this summer and every bookshop I went into seemed to have this on its ‘staff picks’ table, and for good reason, as Koestenbaum manages to be deeply well-read and theoretically sophisticated while still utterly compelling and readable on topics from Roberto Bolaño to internet pornography.

Susan Sontag As Consciousness is Harnessed to Flesh: Diaries 1964-1980 (Penguin, 2013)

The second volume of Sontag’s diaries to be published (in relatively affordable paperback), this is a really engaging and enjoyable range of everything from aphorisms and musings to some really quite thorough analyses by one of the twentieth century’s finest critical minds; the section dealing with her travels in Vietnam is particularly worth a look.

2013, paula meehan, susan sontag, wayne koestenbaum

About

The Glasgow Review of Books (ISSN 2053-0560) is an online journal which publishes critical reviews, essays and interviews as well as writing on translation. We accept work in any of the languages of Scotland – English, Gàidhlig and Scots.

We aim to be an accessible, non-partisan community platform for writers from Glasgow and elsewhere. We are interested in many different kinds of writing, though we tend to lean towards more marginal, peripheral or neglected writers and their work.

Though, our main focus is to fill the gap for careful, considered critical writing, we also publish original creative work, mostly short fiction, poetry and hybrid/visual forms.

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