Bruce Pascoe: Dark Emu. Black Seeds Agriculture Or Accident?.Michelle Tea: Against Memoir.Nicole Chung: All You Can Ever Know. A Memoir.
Fiction:
Courtney S. Stevens: Dress Codes For Small Towns.Min Jin Lee: Pachinko.Ann Leckie: Ancillary Trilogy, Providence.R.O. Kwon: The Incendiaries.Kelly Quindlen: Her Name in the Sky.Sally Rooney: Normal People.Lauren Karcz: The Gallery of Unfinished Girls.Courtney Summers: Sadie.Florence Gonsalves: Love & Other Carnivorous Plants.Meg Wolitzer: The Female Persuasion.Kirstin Chen: Bury What We Cannot Take.Claire G. Coleman: Terra Nullius.Kim Fu: The Lost Girls of Camp Forevermore and For Today I Am A Boy.Hsu-Ming Teo: Behind the Moon and Love and Vertigo.Fiona Shaw: Tell it to the Bees.Sharlene Teo: Ponti.Becky Albertalli: Leah on the Offbeat.Dana Mele: People Like Us.Cristina Moracho: A Good Idea.
And where Dress Codes for Small Towns is in part about religion and what happens when parents' religion clashes with their daughter's attempt to understand her own desires, which don't fit neatly into any category (both in terms of gender representation and maybe being in love with both of her best friends), Kelly Quindlen's Her Name in the Sky has two deeply religious protagonists who try to fit their queerness into their faith, while also trying to maintain friendships that are threatening to fall apart.
So this year I caught up with all the YA that I never read as an actual youth, but it was an absolutely amazing experience to see how many beautifully written non-straight protagonists are ready to be discovered - in Lauren Karcz's The Gallery of Unfinished Girl, which again combines a strong voice in Mercedes, an artist who is struggling to find inspiration in her complicated life (an absent mother who is caring for her dying mother abroad, being responsible for her little sister, being in love with her best friend), with the magical realism of a building that brings forth perfect artistic creations, directly from the mind to the canvas, but doesn't allow the artist to take any of that into the real world. In Florence Gonsalves' Love & Other Carnivorous Plants, a friendship between two girls flails when their experiences start diverging, and individual traumas aren't shared anymore. And then, a surprising late entry, glimmering with so much heart and humour, J.C. Lillies' A&B which construes a world in which a wronged music competition show reject fights her evil side only to realize that this side may be more successful than her carefully cultivated facade of niceness is, at least until she falls in love with a former rival.
In Courtney Summers' Sadie, there is barely anything left to beat back the darkness except for the love that the titular protagonist had for her sister, who has died, and the rage that she now carries against the man she thinks is responsible. In a novel constructed in different perspectives, one of which a fictional true crime podcast, Sadie pursues her goal without hesitation, with the limited resources of a teenager, and as the plot slowly reveals the horrors of her childhood, and the scars that she and her younger sister both suffered, it becomes increasingly clearer that this novel will not have a happy end for anyone. After Summers' other dark novels (especially All the Rage and Fall for Anything) - eloquently written, driven forward by strong young women who have suffered terribly, Sadie is the one that haunts me the most.
And a new Tana French - The Witch Elm, far away for the first time from the Dublin Murder Squad, or rather, still Dublin Murder Squad, but seen from the perspective of a suspect. A novel that is a marvel for somehow following around an insufferable protagonist, who has for all his life profited from the privilege of being white, straight and able-bodied but now comes to realize how hungry the world out there is without the safe protection of the things he has always taken for granted (and, arrogantly, dubbed "luck"). As a body is discovered in the old elm on his dying uncle's property, he has to examine what and how he remembers his youth - battering his own failing memory along with the pink glasses his particular privilege has put on him, while those less fortunate surrounding him point out to him how he's always got it wrong. Since we're trapped in Toby's mind, it's hard to figure out what's happening. As much as I love the Dublin Murder Squad, and especially Broken Harbour, I think this is a quiet favorite.
In R.O. Kwon's The Incendiaries, Phoebe, a college student, becomes increasingly radicalised by an evangelical Christian group, led by an enigmatic extremist, and her boyfriend Will (who reminded me of Donna Tartt's Richard Papen, to cycle back to The Secret History) utterly fails at finding a way to save her.
The characters in Kirstin Chen's Bury What We Cannot Take are asked to make an impossible decision between their two children as they attempt to flee communist China - a novel that maps out the interior landscape of both children perfectly, as each of them reacts differently to the pressures of living in an authoritarian regime, without much help from the adults in their lives.
Sharlene Teo's Ponti is about a monstrous woman - a character in a film, the sole starring role of someone's mother, the starting point of an obsession and a family history of two girls in early 2000s Singapore, as the novel tells their story forward and the story of the actress in the film, backwards.
Vanessa Hua's A River of Stars, a different migration story, about making a life, about an unlikely friendship, about utterly unexpected bootstraps and motherhood.
And others - I finally got around to reading Ann Leckie's The Ancillary Trilogy, just as Providence, which is set in the same universe, was released, and beyond the world- and character-building, the ambitious way in which Leckie writes characters who do not comprehend conventionally gendered language is amazing.
Fiona Shaw's Tell it to the Bees, which has been turned into a film this year, is a beautiful novel about love between two women in a small village in 1950s Scotland, one that does not end tragically.
Sally Rooney's Normal People surprised me, because I did not expect for a story about the complicated friendship and love between its two main characters, eager-to-not-stand-out Connell and odd Marianne to affect me as much as it did - they change each other profoundly, but the best parts of the novel are Connell trying, and often failing, to express his feelings, to make sense of himself.
(and then there is my ongoing attempt to make sense of Australia, but as affecting as Hsu-Ming Teo's two novels Love and Vertigo and especially Behind the Moon, which is about three friends growing up together in Sydney, were, I don't think I'm any nearer than I was before. Claire G. Coleman's Terra Nullius is a dazzling science fiction story that starts with the brutality and terror of the invasion and ends in an invasion of a different sort.
Bright Wall/Dark Room: Hunger. On Food and Grief in A Ghost Story and Certain Women, December 5, 2018Los Angeles Review of Books: Too Close, Too Compromised: Killing Eve and the Promise of Sandra Oh, December 4, 2018The Intelligencer: May Faces Cabinet Mutiny As Brexit Deal Breaks Down, November 15, 2018The New Yorker: How Russia helped swing the election for Trump, October 2018Longreads: 'I Didn't Have the Language to Call it Racism': An Interview with Nicole Chung, October 2018Bloomsberg: The Unsolved Murder of an Unusual Billionaire, October 24, 2018The Lifted Brow: The Critic in the Episode "Me Too", October 22, 2018The New York Review of Books: What to Expect When a Woman Accuses a Man in Power, October 5, 2018The New York Times: Trump Engaged in Suspect Tax Schemes as He Reaped Riches From His Father, October 2, 2018Longreads: Hating Big Pharma Is Good, But Supply-Side Epidemic Theory Is Killing People, September 2018Longreads: They Don’t Want to Know: Rebecca Solnit on Brett Kavanaugh and the Denial of Old White Men, September 28, 2018Slate: Our System Is Too Broken to Assess the Sexual Assault Claim Against Kavanaugh, September 14, 2018Vox: It happened there: how democracy died in Hungary, September 13, 2018Autostraddle: Buffy's Silent Episode Was an Elegy for Its Gays, September 10, 2018
Tin House: Intrusions, September 5, 2018
Meanjin: Australia: Temper and Bias, Spring 2018The New York Times: The Comedy-Destroying, Soul-Affirming Art of Hannah Gadsby, July 24, 2018LitHub: Watching the Handmaid's Tale While Transitioning, July 16, 2018The Millions: After the Welfare State: Kathy Acker and the American Health Care System, July 10, 2018LARB: Loneliness on My Hands: A Conversation with Maggie Nelson, July 9, 2018Vox: Rachel Maddow cries at the family separation crisis. Corey Lewandowski mocks it, June 20, 2018Lawfare: Legal Considerations for Separating Families at the Border, June 19, 2018MSNBC: A look inside Trump immigration facility: 'effectively, these kids are incarcerated', June 14, 2018The Atlantic: What Anthony Bourdain Understood About Authenticity, June 12, 2018The Monthly: The status quo ain’t working, June 7, 2018Fader: Yaeji, June 5, 2018Lithub: The Inherent Anxiety of the "Good Cop" Show, May 21, 2018Wired: Childish Gambino's 'This is America' and the New Shape of Protest Music, May 9, 2018Los Angeles Review of Books: Post-Shawarma: On Avengers: Infinity War, May 2, 2018Taste: Let's Call it Assimilation Food, April 2018Meanjin: Any Percentage of a Heart is Still a Heart, April 2018The Guardian: Richard Flanagan: 'Our politics is a dreadful black comedy' – press club speech in full, April 18, 2018Electric Lit: An Autobiography in Anime, March 21, 2018Shondaland: Searching for My Grandmother's Cooking, March 1, 2018Longreads: Kara Walker's Subtlety, February 2018Autostraddle: Mal Ortberg’s Creepy New Book Is Coming Out and Mal Is Too, February 28, 2018GQ: What Ever Happened to Brendan Fraser, February 22, 2018
Believer: The End Of Evil, February 1, 2018n+1: On Liking Women, January 2018Meanjin: To Those Who Come from Volcanoes: Reflecting on the Legacy of Ursula K. Le Guin, January 25, 2018
Buzzfeed: To Celebrate Australia Day Is To Celebrate Violence, January 22, 2018Wired: How Dirt Could Save Humanity From an Infectuous Apocalypse, January 14, 2018The Cut: I Started the Media Men List My name is Moira Donegan., January 10, 2018The New Yorker: Can Hollywood Change Its Ways?, January 8, 2018Catapult: The Space Between Us and the Ground Below Us, or: Why I Traveled to Japan, January 3, 2018