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Best of 2018: Books

by CALUM BARNES

IN JANUARY And Other Stories kicked off its inspiring Year of Publishing Women with the welcome publication of a new collection of Ann Quinn's short works, Unmapped Country. She was a much-underappreciated British experimental writer from the 1960s and contemporary of BS Johnson and Alan Burns, whose work paved the way for the bracing feminist fictions of Chris Kraus and Kathy Acker.

This avant-garde spirit is thankfully still alive across the pond in Ben Marcus's Notes from the Fog (Granta) and Carmen Maria Machado's Her Body and Other Parties (Serpent's Tail), showing there are writers still bending fiction into invigorating new forms to represent the sense of the uncanny.

For us deficient English-speaking monoglots, it's been another rich year for translated fiction. In February, Penguin published Michael Hofmannn's new translation of Alfred Doblin's 1929 modernist masterpiece Berlin Alexanderplatz, scandalously out of print for many years, while Edinburgh-based Charco Press have gone from strength to strength since their 2016 launch.

It published Julian Fuks's Resistance, an intricately constructed tale of loss and exile masterfully translated by Daniel Hahn, and it's a particular triumph. Told from the perspective of a child of political activists forced to leave the military dictatorship of Argentina for Brazil, Fuks's writing dramatises the fragility of memory and the difficulties of piecing together a life in flight from political persecution, one that is depressingly resonant all over again with the recent election of Bolsonaro.

The death of Mark Fisher in January 2017 was a great loss to the British left. His now legendary blog, with its infectious blend of pop culture, theory and political commentary, has now been compiled by Repeater Press in k-punk.

This gargantuan 817-page tome is a worthy testament to the sheer breadth and vitality of Fisher's thought, vibrantly showing the emancipatory potential of criticism to help us navigate beyond the apparent impasse of the neoliberal present.

 

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