Fiona Sampson's 3 favorite reads in 2023

Let Me Tell You What I Mean is a posthumously published set of 12 short essays – actually literary journalism – by the great American writer Joan Didion.

The pieces are taken from across the whole of her working life, though concentrated on the early years when she was a prolific columnist. They are united by an interest in the craft of writing itself.

That interest is, of course, not confined to just these essays; it’s not confined to the elegance with which they speak straight off the page, either. But this conscious, deliberative taking seriously of what we all try to do is inspiring as well as, frankly, a masterclass in how to do it.

I love Didion for her pioneering, serious, transgressive autofiction, a category we might apply to much of her fiction and nonfiction alike. She shows how to think through life – how to think in living.

Marigold and Rose is subtitled "a fiction," something the Nobel Prize-winning poet has not usually had to append to her books. Yet poetry, however confessional or emotionally astute (as hers is), is always a kind of composition, too – so, a kind of fictionalization of a sensibility, an insight, an experience.

This magically elegant book tells the story of twin girls moving through infancy. It explores how it is possible for us to have pre-verbal concepts, what love and identity are: a whole load of philosophical and emotional questions. But because it’s written by this poet of family life, it has a wonderful dream-like feel.

It is beautiful. It is compulsively readable.

Burning Tongues is a new and selected poems by the leading Slovene poet, Aleš Šteger. It is immaculately translated by Brian Henry, the great translator from the Slovenian, whose editions of Tomaž Šalamun (1941-2014) are also indispensable reading for anyone interested in European poetry.

Šteger is a different kind of poet than his predecessor – more lapidary, playful without surrealism – but he, too, brings contemporary Slovenian writing into the international mainstream. This book, selected by the author himself, is tightly choreographed and sophisticated – urban and urbane – and has an urgent, contemporary bounce.

It exasperates me how little poetry in translation is read and reviewed in the UK; I hope this marvelous collection will find a US home soon.