Our Favourite Writers’ Favourite Books in 2024
By the Liminal Editors and Friends
As 2024 comes to a close, the Liminal editors have been thinking about the best books we’ve read this year. We were also curious to find out what some of our favourite writers have been reading, too. Here is our year in reading!
Cher Tan | Editor | Read Cher’s review, ‘Psychic Exile’, in the Liminal Review of Books
Everything For Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune 2052-2072 (eds. M.E. O’Brien and Eman Abdelhadi) I’ve never said anything like this about a book, but I truly have not read anything like this, which makes me excited about the further de-categorisation of forms and genres. This is a speculative fictional series of interviews conducted by the authors’ imagined selves with (also imagined) interview subjects that each delve into an aspect of the future. Here, we encounter conversations about building structures of care after economic collapse, how wage labour becomes abolished, and creating new forms of co-existence. In a time of such utter catastrophe, I found this to be an especially hopeful read. May the Final Intifada happen, for us and later generations to be able to experience a more fulfilling world.
Very Cold People – Sarah Manguso This book is frigid as fuck. You can absolutely take the title literally. The landscape is cold, the people pinched and unreadable to one another, yet they are bound by an inexplicable affinity which we later realise is fear and insecurity. It’s a slim novel but Manguso packs a lot in. You can nearly feel your world shrink as you read Very Cold People, its small town claustrophobia all-encompassing and unquestionable. Quite a remarkable book.
Leah Jing McIntosh | Editor | Read Leah’s review of Chinese Postman in The Age
Sometimes when I am travelling I find myself running into the same artist, and last year, I kept bumping into Derek Jarman. I felt lucky to find a first edition of Modern Nature at a secondhand bookstore; the next day, at the National Portrait Gallery, I turned the corner and found myself face to face with Hamilton’s portrait of Jarman. A month later, on the other side of the world I found myself watching his film, Blue (1993), at the Dowse Art Museum. Around the same time, I found myself writing a profile on Peter Blazey, whoseScrew Loose is a propulsive and joyously debauched memoir published after his death from AIDS-related illnesses in 1997. A journalist and activist, Blazey also ran for election under the slogan ‘Put a Poofter in Parliament’, years before homosexuality was decriminalised in NSW.
A few weeks ago, I met with his partner, Tim Herbert, who mentioned that he remembered Blazey had been reading Modern Nature in his last years. Sometimes things just fit together. In this and other ways, Modern Nature and Screw Loose feel to me like friends across time and oceans. Which is a silly segue, I suppose, to write that two of my favourite books this year were also by my friends: rock flight, by Hasib Hourani, and Peripathetic by Cher Tan. I had been waiting for them for years and I will be thinking about them for many more.
Andre Dao | Read André Dao on George Eliot in the Liminal Review of Books
In his latest book, Brian Castro pulls off a series of improbable double acts: a masterclass in late style, Chinese Postman is also the most contemporary of novels, a passionate condemnation of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; equally suffused with the melancholy of an elegy with the sharp observations of the wry humourist; oscillating between a playfully autofictional ‘I’ and third-person ‘he’ without a single bum note; an outrageous showcase of technical control and unpredictable invention.
The beginning of the year was taken up by two epics: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy. Not enough time has passed for me to fully understand the tectonic shifts in my consciousness occasioned by each of those books. But where Bolano seems to toll the bell for modernity’s end, Wright does something different, and altogether more significant: she marks the beginning of something new, or rather, the continuation of something very old – another way of being modern, of writing a new modernism, or, in her own words, ‘of being thousands of years modern’.
Brian Castro | Read our 5 Questions with Brian about Chinese Postman
Albert Camus wrote L’etranger (The Stranger) in 1942. It was 159 pages long. An intense, existential novel mired in absurdism, its politics were always going to be controversial. Kamel Daoud wrote The Mersault Investigation (Mersault, contre-enquête) in 2013. It was 152 pages long. In this novel, the murdered man, the stranger, is given a name. It is Musa. Musa’s brother, the narrator, is the investigator of his murder. It gives a face and a name to what is still an existential erasure: ‘If he calls my brother “the Arab,” it’s so he can kill him the way one kills time, by strolling around aimlessly.’
In his latest novel Houris (the current winner of the Prix Goncourt), Kamel Daoud lifts us to another level, writing intensely about the faceless-ness of women in Algeria… their defacement. I’m reading it in French, and I’m stunned. It will not be published in Algeria anytime soon.
Eda Gunaydin | Listen to Eda on the panel “Critical Limit” at Liminal Festival
Translations – Jumaana Abdu A gorgeous, transcendental book. Translations does it all: a compelling narrative driven by complex characters, as well as an epistemological shake-up of the Western canon, which sometimes presumes to know the interiority of Muslim women, but absolutely does not.
Waiting for the Fear – Oguz Atay (trans. Ralph Hubbell) A short story collection by one of Turkey's most famous writers of fiction, translated into English for the first time. Humorous, wry, pessimistic, shares a sensibility with Kafka.
Hasib Hourani | Listen to Hasib on the panel “Language Under Occupation” at the Liminal Festival
Bhanu Kapil’s Incubation and Patjim Statovci’s Crossing are two complex narratives that undertake being the other and being on the move. The books are really different to each other but both quite alien and warped in a way I have found myself finding solace in right now. That’s probably why I’ve also read so much science fiction this year; Kim Bo-Young’s On The Origin of Other Species and Other Stories was a particular highlight.
Vidya Rajan | Go on a Real-Time Cancellation Adventure with Vidya
Sabrina – Nick Drnaso Sabrina's narrative centers around some of my bleaker obsessions—conspiracy theories, crisis actors, isolation and grief within capitalism—but it has the pungent catharsis that accompanies a dive in a cold plunge pool. Dmaso's style feels suited to the banal psychosis of what we might think of as particularly American lives, but its rhythms are everywhere in 2024. I read it in one sitting.
Memory Piece – Lisa Ko Charting the friendship and lives of three Asian-American girlfriends from their youth in the 80s into a distant future, Memory Piece is about art, the internet and the building of worlds: within and without. Ko is not really in conversation with diaspora tropes in the novel, but with something that feels rarer yet just as authentic of diasporic/third culture experience. This is a story that knows there are stranger and grander feelings you carry as an object of time and culture, especially during a time of yearning in girlhood. Even if the story stretches and flags in parts, I couldn't help love the ambition and intelligence of this novel.