The Best Australian Essays has a new editor this year: the always-interesting David Marr. I was excited to see his pick of the year’s best, and wasn’t disappointed.

Christos Tsiolkas opens the collection with ‘Into a Liquid Ether’, a lyrical, reflective piece on his fear, then embrace, of the dark – and with it, the embrace of new experience, of risk, even of danger. Kate Jennings writes on the US mortgage crisis. David Malouf reflects on the Bill Henson debate. Robert Dessaix mounts an indignant defence of Helen Garner’s The Spare Room, rebutting the whispers of ‘but is it fiction?’ Craig Sherborne’s shocking, candid and compelling memoir-essay ‘The Forgiven’, on a past relationship gone wrong, was one of the most amazing things I read this year. And Rachel Robertson’s ‘Reaching One Thousand’, joint winner of the 2008 Calibre Prize for an Outstanding Essay (hosted by Australian Book Review) deeply moved me with its account of finding autism in her family (and her obsessive counter child): sharp, funny, thoughtful and revealing. David Marr’s BAS is lively, eclectic and – most important of all – chock full of superb writing.