The Best Books of 2022: Science Fiction & Fantasy!

Best Books of 2022: SFF!

For the last few years at least, the events of any morning’s newsfeed have seemed to handily outpace most science fiction in terms of technology and most fantasy in terms of Dark Lords, which didn’t necessarily obviate the latest offerings of the genre but did sometimes serve to highlight the lazy rhetorical conventions and shrill political cant of those offerings – both to the point where reading a new work of sci-fi or fantasy often felt like more of a duty than the illicit thrill it always was in past decades. The giants seemed tired, the newcomers seemed compromised, and far too much of the genre seemed pointless. But there were exceptions! These were the ten best of them:

10 The Starless Crown by James Rollins (Tor) — James Rollins returns to his epic fantasy roots in this stereotypical but hugely energetic first installment about a Girl Who’s the Key to Everything who assembles an Unlikely Fellowship around a Mysterious Macguffin in order to save the world. The whole thing would sink instantly under the weight of its own cliches if it weren’t for the zest Rollins brings to the telling, amply aided by the pacing and plotting skills he’s learned from decades of writing thrillers for a general readership. 

9 Go Back At Once by Robert Aickman (And Other Stories) — This stylish reprint of a strange, quirky book about two young women finding layer upon layer of unexpected (and unwanted) revelations in a secretive utopian community was one of the biggest surprises the publishing world had for me in 2022. Aickman wrote this odd book half a century ago, but virtually every one of its distempered obsessions seems to speak directly to the 21st century, God help us. 

8 Last Exit by Max Gladstone (Tor Books) — Max Gladstone’s latest fantasy, the story of a Girl Who’s the Key to Everything who assembles an Unlikely Fellowship around a Mysterious Macguffin in order to save the world, has all the hallmarks of this author’s zippy writing style: sharply drawn characters, lavishly-imagined world-building, and particularly irresistible pacing. Gladstone also has a tendency to center his ensemble casts around one stand-out character, and in Zelda, readers will delight in that character here. 

7 Engines of Empire by RS Ford (Orbit) – Ford’s sprawling novel is filled with prominent and very well-drawn characters dealing with upheavals afflicting the nation of Torwyn and its all-powerful guild. Two main characters, heirs to the most influential of those guilds, are sent on seemingly very different independent missions that turn up separate but ultimately converging shocks for the realm. There’s a refreshingly pragmatic undertone to much of Ford’s world-building; it pulls the reader directly into the stakes of the story.

6 The Stars Undying Emery Robin (Orbit) – In Emery Robin’s story of a Girl Who’s the Key to Everything assembling an Unlikely Fellowship around a Mysterious Macguffin in order to save the world has a fascinating bit of innovation and a very inviting bit of relationship-building at its heart. Robin employs a pleasing variety of narrative techniques to tell various facets of a tale about two young heroines who are plugged into a network beyond the understanding of their world as they contest with each other and an array of other forces to gain power. 

5 Daughter of the Moon Goddess by Sue Lynn Tan (Harper Voyager) – Sue Lynn Tan’s debut fantasy story of a Girl Who’s the Key to Everything assembling an Unlikely Fellowship around a Mysterious Macguffin in order to save the world is crafted out of Chinese mythology rather than European folklore: Xingyin, the daughter of the moon goddess, must hide her supernatural abilities by taking on a disguise in the Celestial Kingdom, where an array of ordinary human experiences, wonderful to her, unfold in ways that are genuinely touching.

4 Rise of the Mages by Scott Drakeford (Tor) – This next entry, also a debut, Scott Drakeford firmly establishes himself as a formidable talent in the grim-and-gritty neighborhood of epic fantasy, telling the story of a man who responds to the instructions of his clandestine mage-tutor in order to become a power in his own right – not only to combat an ancient rising evil but also to save the life of his brother. Drakeford has a gift for stuffing his narrative full of details without making it feel stuffed, and his skill at pacing keeps the book hurtling along after the second act.

3 This Woven Kingdom by Taharef Mafi (HarperCollins) – This novel, YA in its structure and sentiment, is likewise drawn from a non-feudal, non-European folkloric matrix, in this case Persian mythology, and the story it tells, of a Girl Who’s the Key to Everything assembling an Unlikely Fellowship around a Mysterious Macguffin in order to save the world, is full of the teased passions and overblown wordplay of young adult fiction but also its vivid primary colors, making this a promising start to a new series. 

2 In the Shadow of Lightning by Brian McClellan (Tor) – Brian McClellan’s terrifically high-energy story of a fallen outcast who must claw his way back from rock bottom in order to avenge his mother’s death is working familiar territory, admittedly, as are most of the entries on the list this year, but as with most of those other cases, McClellan attacks those old gimmicks with a vigor that makes the book feel fresh. 

1 The Citadel of Forgotten Myths by Michael Moorcock (Gallery/Saga Press) – In a comparatively weak year for science fiction and fantasy, it feels almost unfair that Michael Moorcock should wade into the competition at all, much less that he should do so with a return to his most popular creation. And yet that’s just what happens in this, the year’s best SFF entry, a new story in Moorcock’s much-honored saga of Elric of Melniboné, set in the early years of the doom-haunted albino sorcerer’s adventures. Moorcock has lost scarcely a stroke of his narrative power in his early eighties; as a result, far from merely holding a place on a list, The Citadel of Forgotten Myths immediately takes its place in the canon.

The Best Books of 2022: Mystery

Best Books of 2022: Mystery!

Oddly enough, grisly murder too made a wonderful escape from the ugly realities of the world – every bit as much as romance, only with a higher body-count. Savants have analyzed this seeming contradiction for well over a century, but the simplest answers have probably always been the right ones: that the misfortunes happen to somebody other than the reader, and that injustices tend to have solid, logical rightings. Whatever the reason, mystery novels were a wonderful relief all year long, and these were the best of them:

10 Showstopper (Peter Diamond) by Peter Lovesey (Soho Crime) – It’s a sure-fire recipe for a terrific start to a Best Mystery list to mix the salt-of-the-earth wisdom and insight of Peter Diamond’s star sleuth, police chief Peter Diamond with the glitz and fakery of big-budget TV, and that’s what happens in Lovesey’s latest: Diamond must solve a series of ominous happenings on the set of a popular TV show, with the threat of his own job’s termination looming over his efforts. Lovesey always sparkles; this latest wonderfully upholds this streak.

9 To Kill a Troubadour by Martin Walker (Knopf) – Walker’s latest procedural starring police chief Bruno strays far more deeply into volatile real-world politics than this author usually does, in this case simmering tensions between Catalonia and the Spanish government. This brings an array of grander forces to bear on Bruno’s investigation of a sniper threat; suddenly our stalwart hero is dealing with national governments instead of merely the usual recalcitrant locals. And the combination works wonderfully – and makes Bruno more interesting than ever.

8 Death and the Conjuror by Tom Mead (Mysterious Press) – This historical murder mystery is set in 1930s London and is kicked off with a classic locked room mystery: a well-known psychiatrist is found dead in his study – no witnesses, no evidence, no clues of any kind, a seemingly magical tragedy that prompts Scotland Yard to consult an actual stage magician, Joseph Spector. The winning simplicity of this conceit is paired wonderfully with the nuts-and-bolts details of the police procedural world; it’s a combination that works to perfection.

7 Hatchet Island by Paul Doiron (Mike Bowditch) (Minotaur Books) – Maine game warden Mike Bowditch returns in this reliably terrific series, this time in the wild equivalent of a locked room: an isolated research station well off the coast, where a tight-knit scientists are being stalked and terrorized by a mysterious marauder. Bowditch is there on the island with his girlfriend Stacey, and they’re both caught up in the escalating violence. Doiron writes these Bowditch mysteries with a gripping, straightforward lack of fuss that makes them propulsive reading, particularly in the second half of each book, when the action and the red herrings increase to a frantic pitch.

6 When Blood Lies by CS Harris (Berkley) – This historical series starring Sebastian St. Cyr, Viscount Devlin, is equally reliable; this latest is the seventeenth installment in the series and every bit as inviting and energetic as all the earlier volumes. This latest adventure is more personal than most Devlin adventures, hinging in its early section on the sudden murder of Devlin’s mother, the Countess of Hendon, in the France of 1815. In the middle of his confusion and grief, Devlin must focus on trying to find the killer, and as usual with this series, Harris does a masterful job combining narrative tension with plenty of historical detail.

5 A Sunlit Weapon by Jacqueline Winspear (Harper) – This is likewise an adventure late in the fictional career of its protagonist, in this case Jacqueline Winspear’s popular intrepid sleuth Maisie Dobbs. This latest installment is set in October of 1942 and finds Maisie dealing not only with a series of mysterious attacks on ferry pilots flying over British soil but also with the visit of Eleanor Roosevelt, who’s naturally being targeted by covert German agents. Readers of this series will know already to expect that no situation can exceed our heroine’s capabilities, but they also know how fantastically readable every adventure is.

4 Give Unto Others by Donna Leon (Atlantic Monthly Press) – Venetian Commissario Brunetti returns in this latest installment from Donna Leon (twice as venerable as most of the other series on this list), in which he’s asked for help by an acquaintance and at first tries to handle the matter unofficially. The acquaintance’s accountant son-in-law feels certain he’s in danger, and true to form, the plot thickens until both Brunetti and his police colleagues are drawn into a far darker mystery than they first suspected. Leon is by now an old hand at creating these kinds of entertainments, and once again it’s Brunetti’s understated humanity that makes each novel such a winning read.

3 The Mitford Vanishing by Jessica Fellowes (Minotaur Books) – Most of the items on this iist this year are very much known quantities, the latest installments in long-running series, and although these mysteries by Jessica Fellowes featuring the famous Mitford sisters is comparatively young in such company, the novels have long since felt like old friends. In this latest one, Nancy Mitford asks the family’s former maid Louisa Cannon to look into the disappearance of Jessica Mitford, and Fellowes skillfully melds sparkling wit with atmospheric tension.

2 The Burglar Who Met Fredric Brown by Lawrence Block (LB Productions) – This year’s science fiction & fantasy list had the utter delight of an eighty-something old master, Michael Moorcock, writing a new adventure of his signature character, and the mystery list does likewise: Lawrence Block gives readers a new adventure by his antiquarian bookseller and gentleman thief, Berni Rhodenbarr, and the reading here is nothing less than exquisite – all the fizzle and pop of the classic earlier adventures, but seasoned to perfection by age and craft, particularly with Bernie facing the high-tech bafflements of the modern era.

1 The Bangalore Detectives Club by Harini Nagendra (Pegasus) – The best mystery of 2022 kicks off a new series that introduces a smart and logical young woman named Kaveri, married to an ambitious young doctor in Bangalore. Happenstance ensares Kaveri in a murder, and suddenly she’s realizing that she enjoys the challenges of private detection at least as much as she might have enjoyed the sedate life of a doctor’s wife. What follows is a mystery yarn full of well-drawn characters and rich atmosphere, a vividly memorable evocation of Bangalore and a fantastically inviting introduction to a new series.

The Best Books of 2022: Romance

Best Books of 2022: Romance!

Two elements are always present in my annual roundup of the year’s best romance novels: 1) I always praise the entire genre for being a smart, well-crafted, and incredibly reliable haven from the drooling and turd-flinging that tends to characterize so much of the rest of the publishing world’s offerings, and 2) I always strive, alone, in heroic solitude, to make my list balanced enough to include types of romance other than my beloved Regencies. The first is always easy. As to the second? Well, I read more romance novels in 2022 than any previous year of my life, and these were the best of them:

10 The Rebel and the Rake by Emily Sullivan (Forever) – This one gets onto the list under the wire, since it came out almost on the very last day of 2021, long after all year-end book-listers had tottered off for their fair share of heavily spiked eggnog. That seemed like an unfair deal for this delightful novel by Emily Sullivan, the story of an undercover agent masquerading as a rake who unexpectedly falls in love with a lady’s companion who very much seems to want nothing to do with him (or with men in general). She’s harboring a secret identity of her own, and Sullivan does a very entertaining job bringing all these plot strands together. 

9 The Bride Goes Rogue by Joanna Shupe (Avon) – In most of my genre-driven year-end lists, it’s unavoidable, I hope, that familiar names will crop up, and that’s certainly true on the Romance list, starting with this entry by Joanna Shupe, the third of her “Fifth Avenue Rebels” series. In this delightful entry, a New York debutante long affianced to a stand-offish tycoon is enjoying her life to the fullest when both she and the tycoon encounter the most unexpected obstacle of all: they actually fall in love. All of Shupe’s strengths for pacing and witty dialogue are on full display here. 

8 A Daring Pursuit by Kate Bateman (St. Martin’s) – Another long-time favorite, Kate Bateman, returns with this second entry in her “Ruthless Rivals” series, in which a young woman is very deliberately trying to ruin her chances on the marriage mart. Using outlandish behavior (and acting for her own reasons, protecting a secret she views as disastrous), she’s succeeded for a couple of years – but the one man who’s never fully believed her facade is also the one man she’s secretly obsessed with. Bateman is always wonderful at constructing plots that work with perfect smoothness, and this time was no exception.

7 How To Be a Wallflower by Eloisa James (Avon) – When it comes to familiar names, they don’t get much more familiar than Eloisa James, and this terrific book kicks off her new “Would-Be Wallflower” series in which a young woman is about to make her debut in high society at the wishes of her pushy grandfather, even though she has no desire to marry. In these pages, she’s matched against a wealthy American who’s in London to buy an emerald for his intended back in America – that is, until he begins to fall in love right there in London, with a woman who’s falling in love with him. Eloisa James has never once failed me, and this delightful novel certainly doesn’t.

6 Return of the Duke by Lorraine Heath (Avon) – This third installment in Lorraine Heath’s “Once Upon a Dukedom” series rests in an uncharacteristically dark backdrop of murder and betrayal. A man whose father was hanged for attempting to kill Queen Victoria finds himself ruined and embittered, dedicated to investigating a very much still-active plot against the Crown – an aim he unexpectedly shares with the young woman he considers one of the worst traitors in his life. Lorraine Heath shapes an involving and ultimately uplifting story of love and redemption out of these dark elements.

5 The Gunslinger’s Guide to Avoiding Matrimony by Michelle McLean (Entangled: Amara) – Most romance novels sparkle at least a little, but Michelle McLean indulges herself in a full-on comedy of errors in this wonderful story of a young gunslinger who seeks refuge in the hidden Old West town of Desolation and quickly finds something more than refuge – namely an unexpected marriage with a feisty young woman who doesn’t think he’s all that impressive. McLean is clearly having a blast all through the book, never passing up an opportunity to crack jokes in the admittedly absurdist Shangri-La she’s created.

4 Tough Justice Tee O’Fallon (Entangled: Amara) – Dark plot materials return with a vengeance in this first installment in Tee O’Fallon’s “K-9 Special Ops” series, in which a DEA K-9 agent (and his dog, of course) is hunting for the source of a new drug that’s causing massive overdoses in the Denver area. He hopes he can enlist the help of a brilliant ER doctor, even though she deeply distrusts him for an array of personal reasons. I wasn’t familiar with O’Fallon’s books (despite their penchant for having gorgeous dogs on their covers), and I was very pleased by her talent for the old familiar “reluctant lovers” romance pattern.

3 Must Love Books by Shauna Robinson (Sourcebooks Landmark) – For all the unlikely pairings featured in the vast backlog of the romance genre, maybe the most unlikely is the marriage of bookishness with romance of any kind (since most bookish people would rather stay home and read). But Shauna Robinson indulges in the fantasy with this story of an overworked and underappreciated editorial assistant at a publishing house who’s thrown into a relationship with a bestselling author when the publishing house begins to fire people. Robinson fills her tale with details every bookish person will love – from the solitary comfort of their reading couches, that is.

2 The Boardwalk Bookshop by Susan Mallery (Mira Books) – As most genre readers have known for a long time, romance novels don’t need to be seamy bodice-rippers; sometimes, the ones that are more about love than sex are actually more thrilling in their own heart-touching way. Susan Mallery is a virtuoso at this kind of romantic fiction, and her entry on this list, The Boardwalk Bookshop, is a classic of the kind, the story of three strangers who find themselves co-owners of a bookshop in California. These three women come from three separate battlefields of romantic pasts, and they approach the opportunities of their new shop in touchingly different ways, all of which Mallery does a wonderful job of portraying.

1 Nobody’s Princess by Erica Ridley (Forever) – This third book in Eric  Ridley’s “The Wyld Winchesters” series is the story of a clash of titanic willpowers: a fiercely-tempered young woman has come to London for clandestine training that will serve her well back in her own homeland, and a handsome member of the Wynchester clan who’s determined to come to the aid of a young woman who doesn’t want his help at all – or thinks she doesn’t, until the inevitable happens (this is a romance novel, after all, in fact the best romance of the year) and these two strong-willed people begin to fall in love. 

The Best Books of 2022: Debut Fiction

Best Books of 2022: Debut Fiction

It’s usually a thrill to survey the field of debut fiction every year for the compiling of this list. There’s usually nothing more bracing than a first novel, so full of possibilities, so free of baggage. But like so many things in the 21st century, those “usually”s are more uprooted every year. Fiction particularly is a battlefield; it’s never been more compromised and threadbare, never more derivative and navel-gazing. And in a cultural moment of weaponized entitlement, no kind of fiction is more vulnerable to these currents than debut fiction. As I’ll mention again later in our list this year, the overwhelming majority of the worst fiction I read this year was debut fiction. But luckily, there were exceptions! Here are the best of them:

10 Things We Found When the Water Went Down by Tegan Nia Swanson (Catapult) – This remarkable debut is working on many levels, including as a murder mystery and a coming-of-age yarn, all of it set against a weird North Country backdrop that subtly warps and changes with the moods of the story. The sixteen-year-old girl at the heart of the story wants to solve the death of a loutish miner, uncover the mysteries of her mother’s life, and penetrate the enigma of a local stranger, and Swanson sets about it all with such a hearty storyteller mischief that, as hackneyed as it is to say, you often forget it’s a debut.

9 The Family Izquierdo by Ruben Delgollado (WW Norton) – Even among the top picks of debut fiction, some of the selections share some of the ills that beset the year, and although that’s certainly true in this debut from Ruben Delgollado, the author manages to rise above those ills in order to tell the story of the many characters in three generations of a Mexican American family dealing with a string of setbacks and tragedies – and also with a supernatural element that adds a decidedly double-edged flavor to the whole story. 

8 Holding Her Breath by Eimear Ryan (Mariner) – Ryan’s story of former Olympic swimmer candidate Beth Crowe and her life – a personal crisis and then an attempt at a personal re-invention – is heartfelt throughout and appealingly multilayered. Readers follow Beth as she migrates from the world of competitive swimming to the world of literary parties and book debuts and poetasters who idolize Beth’s grandfather, a celebrated poet who died before she was born. The narrative is uneven, and of course the ending, such as it is, is botched, but there’s real feeling in this first outing.

7 My Name is Yip by Paddy Crew (Overlook) – This debut distinguishes itself with outside-the-box aspirations, a Western that takes all the precepts of the sub-genre and playfully inverts them. Set in 1815 Georgia, this is the story of Yip Tolroy, who’s a social outcast, and his fiercely protective mother, who comes close to stealing the novel on multiple occasions. The bildungsroman is a very common pattern in Western-themed novels, and in this lean, readable book, Paddy Crew manages to make it feel arrestingly new by injecting it with a torrent of melodrama that under other circumstances might look ridiculous.

6 Delphi by Clare Pollard (Simon & Schuster) – The famously enigmatic future-predicting oracle of Delphi is the ideological pivot-point of this excellent, intriguing debut from Clare Pollard, which tells the story of a classics professor who, spurred in part by the massive unpredictability of the COVID-19 pandemic, becomes obsessed the ancient world’s obsession with predicting the future in a doomed attempt to insulate itself from the shocks of the present. The Delphi oracle was of course just the tip of the iceberg; the ancient world was full prophecy techniques, and as our main character studies and tries all of them, Pollard very skillfully draws readers into the mania.

5 Other Names for Love by Taymour Soomro (FSG) – The premise of this debut – forbidden gay love – is admittedly simple and predictable, but Taymour Soomro invests his story of Pakistani teenagers Fahad and Ali and their blooming attraction with a heartfelt authenticity that’s skillfully enhanced by the equally predictable portions starring an older-and-wiser Fahad. There’s definitely a market for these semi-exotic gay love stories, and although their ultimate impetus might be deeply off-kilter, the products are often very good even in their first outings, like this one.

4 The Fields by Erin Young (Flatiron Books) – Of course, not all entries on a debut fiction list are or should be art-infused lit’rary fiction – it’s considerably harder to succeed in crafting an actual fictional story as opposed to an almost imperceptibly altered version of your own Facebook timeline, so a well-done mystery/thriller is an unexpected delight, like this one by Erin Young that kicks off in the American Midwest when a dead body is found in an Iowa cornfield. The dead person was a childhood friend of the policewoman who’s assigned to the case, and Erin Young covers this admittedly familiar ground with a wonderfully refreshing energy.

3 A Little Hope by Ethan Joella (Scribner) – This debut is every bit as warm and unabashedly humanistic as The Family Izquierdo, a deceptively big and heartfelt story elegantly folded and re-folded into the delicate little framework of a seemingly idyllic family that’s rocked to its foundations by an unexpected cancer diagnosis. Their tight-knit and seemingly idyllic neighborhood is likewise rocked, and from these simple, straightforward elements, Ethan Joellla composes something memorably good.

2 Shmutz by Felicia Berliner (Atria Books) – Every so often, far less frequently in fact than should be true, a debut novel comes along that feels like a debut, rather than some aspiring author’s best attempt to imitate a mid-career novel of some established author, a debut novel that seems to relish in the strange originality of its own weird narrative impulses. This book by Felicia Berliner is just such a debut, the oddly exuberant story of a woman in an Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn who develops first a fascination with online pornography and then perhaps an eensey-weensy addiction to it. Given such ingredients, it’s hardly surprising that this book is funny (although that’s not a given, God knows, in the largely humorless 21st century literary world); the added delight is how emotionally touching it ends up being.

1 My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson (Flatiron Books) – This is Rasheed Newson’s first novel, but he’s nonetheless a veteran storyteller, having worked on the writing for a number of cable TV shows – and the skills he honed in those various writers’ rooms are very much on display in this, the best fiction debut of the year, the story of a young black man in the 1980s who leaves his comfortable Midwest family behind and moves to a feral New York City bubbling over with both gay subculture and a virus sweeping through that gay subculture. Young Trey enters the moment, becomes an activist, and begins to find out who he is, and Newson turns it all into an utterly absorbing drama that quickly made me hope for a dozen more novels from this very busy writer. 

The Best Books of 2022: Literature in Translation

The Best Books of 2022: Literature in Translation!

As I tend to mention at this point, the health of a year’s lists of translated literature tends to be an interesting indicator of the health of the publication year just in general. The idea that the American reading public is timidly monocultural is persistent, but every year the lists of translated works gives me a bit more hope. This year saw quite a few outstanding titles, including some of my favorite reading experiences of the entire year. These were the best of them:

10 The Disappearance of Josef Mengele by Olivier Guez (translated by Georgia de Chamberet)(Verso) – Our list this year begins as it will end, with an extremely talented author deeply researching a full-fledged monster from history and infusing them with an understandability that comes right up to the edge of sympathy without ever fully crossing over. This is a tricky bit of alchemy (and woefully understandable, given our deplorable historical moment), and Guez manages it perfectly. And as an added bonus, the author also adds a layer of almost thriller-esque narrative tension as virtually everybody involved, including Mengele and especially including the reader, becomes increasingly aware on some level that his capture is inevitable. 

9 The Trouble with Happiness and Other Stories by Tove Ditlevsen (translated by Michael Favala Goldman) (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – The more I’ve reflected on this author’s universally-celebrated Copenhagen Trilogy, the less I’ve liked it. So this new collection of Ditlevsen’s stories in English, written half a century ago and never before translated, was both a pleasure and a relief: I loved it, although that made me wonder about the reason. Was it the change of translators, even though Tina Nunnally is one of the best translators working today? Or was it that I like this author better when she’s working in a shorter and less self-indulgent form? Whichever, these stories kept me gripped throughout

8 Red and the Black by Stendhal, translated by Raymond MacKenzie (University of Minnesota Press) – Although the principal joy of translated literature is always exploration, there’s also the happiness of encountering old friends in new clothes. I’ve loved and re-read Stendhal’s brilliant, absorbing story of Julien Sorel’s damned grappling with society for the whole of my reading life, and I was delighted with this new translation, which captures so well the curious buzzing speed of Stendhal’s narrative. And this edition goes further, providing readers with all the critical underpinnings they might need in order to understand the book’s nuances – all without ever clogging up its incredibly powerful momentum.

7 Swanfolk by Kristin Omarsdottir (translated by Vala Thorodds) (Harpervia) – Another benefit of reading translated literature is the access it gives even an adventurous reader to the kinds of strange flights of fancy that are increasingly absent from American writing, for one glaringly obvious reason (if you’re writing about what you did last Monday, and I can factually verify that you’re being 100% accurate, and what you did last Monday was boring, the result is pre-ordained). This odd, elegant novel by Kristin Omarsdottir is a very good example, the story of a conflicted spy who encounters a weird species of half-human half-swan bird-people who offer her both commentary on the mess of her current life and a possible escape from it. The author just goes about the surreal business of telling her story, and it’s fascinating and weirdly assured.

6 Trinity, Trinity, Trinity by Erika Kobayashi (translated by Brian Bergstrom)(Astra House) – Cinema-infused surreality comes back with double force in this strange, beautiful novel from Erika Kobayashi (courtesy of translator Brian Bergstrom), which braids a vast number of narrative threads into a whole that manages to be both obscure and tremendously moving. At the heart of the novel, weirdly anchoring all of its threads and digressions, is the Fukushima nuclear plant disaster of 2011, but another compelling element is “Trinity,” a strange disease spreading through the country, speaking in tones of quiet insanity directly into the minds of the elderly. I was never quite sure what was going on in Kobayashi’s book, but I was always certain of some great and coherent design just out of reach.

5 Cheri and the Last of Cheri by Colette (translated by Rachel Careau) (WW Norton) – Translator Rachel Careau here perfectly captures the breathy desperation of Colette’s devastating two-part love story of a high-profile courtesan and the oddly alluring younger man who makes her feel emotions she’d long since considered dead inside her – and then a whole new slate of emotions when the pitiless passage of time is added in the second half. In any translation of these two works, it’s “The Last of Cheri” that will test the skills of the translator, and Careau succeeds amazingly. Colette doesn’t lack for translators, but this volume from WW Norton is outstanding.

4 Chilean Poet by Alejandro Zambra (translated by Megan McDowell)(Viking) – My winning streak with this author continues, thankfully, with this story of, among other things, a poetry-drunk man named Vicente and his father Gonzalo, furtive and filled with conflicting melancholies. Zambra has always crafted a kind of prose that’s completely distinctive even in English-language translation, full of strange, looping trains of thought and turns of phrase that refract back on each other even when separated by a hundred pages; it must be a daunting thing to translate, and Megan McDowell does a quietly astounding job – one of the many examples on this list of translators really doing their craft proud. 

3 Mr President by Miguel Angel Asturias (translated by David Unger) (Penguin Classics) – It’s always a delight to see a Penguin Classic turn up on the Literature in Translation list, this time David Unger’s new rendition of one of Nobel Prize-winning Guatemalan author Miguel Angel Asturias’ most powerful novels. Asturias is at his most bitingly brilliant in this book (and Hombres de maiz, which we can only hope comes out from Penguin in due time), which hasn’t been translated into English in decades and here takes its place in the Penguin Classics line, with a foreword by Mario Vargas Llosa. “Mr. President” makes uncomfortably pointed reading in the aforementioned deplorable historical moment, but then, it was designed to do just that.

2 The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk (translated Jennifer Croft) (Riverhead Books) – One of the most memorable fiction reading experiences I had in 2022 was a work in translation, this big, deceptively challenging novel that’s about, on one level, an 18th-century messiah figure as he’s seen through the eyes of all the people whose lives he disrupts. I initially read the book as a very rich but straightforward historical novel about societies and religions in two sprawling extinct polyglot empires. But the longer I thought about it, the more I realized was boiling and bubbling beneath that surface, so that re-reading it was a revelation – and my admiration for Jennifer Croft’s ability to translate all of this bewildering profusion so smoothly only increased every time I revisited the book.

1 M: Son of the Century by Antonio Scurati (translated by Anne Milano Appel) (Harper) – This fat historical novel about what we can only call the formative years of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was the best work of literature in translation that I read in 2022, and it was also the best fiction-reading experience I had in 2022. That combination – where the novel I loved most wasn’t written in English and therefore won’t be found on my Best Fiction list – is very rare in my reading experience, but from very early on in the year there was little doubt in my mind that it would be true. Like Olivier Guez with Josef Mengele, Antonio Scurati amasses a huge amount of research in order to humanize Mussolini completely – the scathing intelligence, the brutality, the sentimental womanizing, the weird moral fervor – without ever trying to elicit sympathy. The result is a gripping and often sordid reading experience but also a toweringly magnificent one.

The Best Books of 2022: Reprints!

The Best Books of 2022: Reprints!

As in all years, an interesting index of the health of the publishing world in 2022 is the breadth and variety of its reprints. These are the books that are most immune to hype; they’re the titles championed and launched most predominantly out of faith that flexible, adventurous readers are out there, ready to try something new or re-assess something they haven’t seen in decades. 2022’s lists were full of vigorous reprints of all kinds. These were the best of them:

10 High Sierra & The Asphalt Jungle by WR Burnett (Stark House) – Wonderful to see these hyperventilating but nevertheless oddly deep noir classics from the author of “Little Caesar.” By deliberately selecting two Burnett works that are now far better known as movies than they ever were as books, the folks at Stark House very cannily draw attention to the originalities of the novels. And although those originalities are, let’s just say, a bit weaker than this author’s few remaining hipster friends might claim (ironically, of course), at the very least they deserve to be assessed independently of Bogey’s shadow.

9 Home to Stay!: The Complete EC Stories  by Ray Bradbury (Fantagraphics) – This winningly dorky volume is a prime example of how unpredictably wonderful the world of reprint culture can be. For the first time, all of the Ray Bradbury stories that were adapted by EC Comics over the years are collected in one lovely volume, on high-quality paper, with artwork by legendary figures like Frank Frazetta, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. Bradbury was great fun as a short story writer in the first place; adding these lively (and often strangely passionate) comic book panels only adds to that fun. 

8 The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB Classics) – This volume of 35 pieces by the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick presents readers with a stunning further illustration of the depth of Hardwick’s insights – and the sheer reach of her interests. The obviously perfect companion to the NYRB Collected Essays, this book features even more variety and, at many points, an intriguingly lighter tone that works as a perfect complement to the High Mass solemnity that characterizes a lot of the earlier volume. These pieces have never been collected in earlier anthologies; encountering them again is completely refreshing.

7 The Amazing Spider-Man, Black Panther, Captain America (Penguin Classics) – 2022 saw a marriage I’d been waiting for my entire adult life without realizing it: Penguin Classics reprinting Marvel Comics. For this first batch (of many, we can only hope), the editors chose the original classic Spider-Man adventures written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko, a great revivalist run of Captain America by the legendary duo of Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and the odd, did-it-age-well Black Panther run written by Don McGregor (with art by Rich Buckler and Billy Graham). The full-color oversized volumes are instant treasures.

6 Fadeout (Dave Brandstetter #1) by Joseph Hansen (Soho Syndicate) – The good folks at Soho Syndicate are celebrating the mind-boggling fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Joseph Hansen’s gay PI David Brandstetter by re-issuing all the Brandstetter novels with new cover art and new introductions. And once the culture-shock of the re-reading has subsided a bit (Brandstetter is solving crimes in a very different world for gay men than the one gay men in the US inhabit today, although the reading mind naturally notices the things that have stayed the same, or may all too soon return), you’re able to appreciate in new ways the craftsmanship Hansen brought to these stories. That’s one of the many gifts of passion-project reprints like these; they prompt re-examinations of things you maybe haven’t thought about in decades. It’s good to welcome Dave Brandstetter back. 

5 Call Me a Cab by Donald Westlake (Hard Case Crime) – According to the true believers at Hard Case Crime, this slim novel is the last one Donald Westlake left unpublished at his death in 2008, and although it’s just faintly possible that at least one element of such a claim might be a tad exaggerated, it’s still a joy to encounter any Westlake at any time, very much including this snappy, sometimes surreal story about a taxi driver who takes on a job of driving a mystery woman across the country from Manhattan to LA. It’s an oddly static outing from Westlake – not a narrative failure by any stretch (this author couldn’t really ever manage that), but definitely missing some of the weird, sardonic forward momentum of many of this author’s better-known books. Every bit as fun, though. 

4 The Desert Smells Like Rain by Gary Paul Nabhan (University of Arizona Press) – Certainly the most unexpected reprint of the year, for me, was this call back to forty years ago, an eloquent, submersive look at the Tohono O’odham people of the Sonoran Desert. The author’s ability to marry startling eloquence with quotidian details of daily life on the edges of human subsistence is remarkable; it consistently reminded me of the strong impression this odd cult classic of anthropology made on me the first time I read it.

3 Army of the Potomac Trilogy by Bruce Catton (Library of America) – In another reprint event I’ve been waiting for and dreaming about for a long, long time, the Library of America finally inducted the great American Civil War historian Bruce Catton to its list, here reprinting in one sturdy, handy volume Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox. LOA volumes have an unbeatable array of native features, from archival paper to ribbon bookmarks to a minimum of editorial palaver, and as a result, this volume immediately takes its place as one of the nicest popular presentations of this brilliant author, whose histories read with such headlong bardic power. I can now start patiently waiting for a second Catton volume.

2 The Silmarillion illustrated by JRR Tolkien (William Morrow) – Almost every year sees a few new designs for reprints of JRR Tolkien’s great works, but this year presented readers with something they hadn’t seen before in the US market: a lavish deluxe edition of The Silmarillion with Tokien’s own illustrations throughout. This book has always been both a special treat to Tolkien fans and a genuine head-scratcher to the uninitiated; it’s the collected theology, mythology, and folklore underpinning the legendarium forming the imaginative backdrop of this author’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and as such it has both concentrated episodes of intense dramatic power – and also long stretches that read the Book of Leviticus as translated and adapted by Sir Walter Scott. But for those Tolkien fans, such as yours truly, this volume is a pure gift.

1 Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1947-1999, edited Ben Wilkins (Monthly Review Press) – It’s been over 15 years since the death of the mighty Anne Braden, which makes Anne Braden Speaks, the best reprint volume of 2022, at once so melancholy and arrestingly welcome. Braden was sharply, relentlessly clear-eyed in her assessments of all the vital social issues of her day, from civil rights to nuclear proliferation. In half a century of writing and speaking, Braden made all the right enemies, and the whole time she was producing knotty, fiercely complicated explications of her stances (and demolitions of the stances of the complacent or wicked). The editing on this volume does a wonderful job of unobtrusively positioning those writings for a new generation – one that desperately needs them, alas.

Penguins on Parade: The Apocryphal Gospels!

Some Penguin Classics come like thieves in the night, stepping carefully and gently as they go. This might be reprehensible, but it’s natural too, particularly when it comes to subjects like religion – which is of course central to one of the newest additions to the Penguin Classics line, The Apocryphal Gospels, a volume of off-brand Christian writings edited and translated by Simon Gathercole. 

The volume includes infancy gospels like the Protevangelium, two dozen ministry gospels like the famous Gospel of Thomas or the Gospel of Eve, the gospels of Peter and Judas and Mary, and a final section titled “Two Modern Forgeries”: “The Secret Gospel of Mark,” and “The Gospel of Jesus’ Wife.” Some of these apocryphal works are fragmentary or very short, and Gathercole presents each one of them in a new translation with separate introductions and notes in every case. Readers who’ve only encountered some of this material the old Meridian paperback The Lost Books of the Bible and the Forgotten Books of Eden (a surprise hit edited by Rutherford Platt) will find this new Penguin Classics The Apocryphal Gospels an invaluable scholarly update, an endlessly fascinating look at all the parts of Christianity that were excluded from Christianity by editors, censors, and politicians in various Church councils over the centuries. 

Things like, for instance, the “Jewish Anti-Gospel” that’s quoted extensively by the Platonist philosopher Celsus in a book of his called “The True Word” and then re-quoted by the Church Father Origen around AD 250 for purposes of refutation in his own book Against Celsus. From those fragmentary third-hand quotations, it sure seems like this “Anti-Gospel” would have made for some lively reading, with its author hectoring Jesus directly the whole time:

But why was it necessary for you to be taken off to Egypt when you were still a child, in case you were murdered? It is hardly likely that a god would be afraid of death. But – ah, yes – an angel came from heaven, instructing you and your family to flee, and if you did not leave you would die. But would the great God not be able to preserve you, his own son, there? He had already sent two angels because of you!

But as wonderful as this new Penguin volume is, it still wants to sell in America. And huge swaths of the United States are vicious science-denying theocracies who might frown on the appearance of a book like this in the God-fearing bookstores. At least, that’s the only explanation I can come up with for some of the very puzzling things Gathercole writes in his Introduction, which starts off with these astonishing lines: “A good deal of the apocryphal literature has no particularly subversive purpose. It is pious legendary material supplying complementary narratives to the existing canonical Gospels. The Gospel material in this category does not in any sense seek to challenge the conventional picture of Jesus, and indeed in some respects it emphasizes or exaggerates the orthodox view …” 

Obviously, nothing could be further from the truth – something Gathercole himself acknowledges only a few paragraphs later, when, for example, he’s talking about the Gospel of the Egyptians, an almost entirely ethereal account that “scarcely seems to touch down on planet earth unti the very end.” He follows this summary directly with this: “The Gospels of Judas and Thomas are no less subversive, but – unlike the Gospel of the Egyptians – they do seek to undercut the New Testament Gospels on their own terms, that is, by presenting accounts which resemble the canonical four to some degree.” 

So we go from “not subversive” to “subversive'' in the span of one page, and only a moment or two actually reading the texts Gathercole so expertly translates will tell readers which one it is. Almost all of these texts were clearly written either before the Christian literary orthodoxy began to harden into place or else were written explicitly to challenge that orthodoxy. That’s precisely why the early orthodox Church hated them so much.

Or did they? Again, this edition must walk a fine line. Hence, another of Gathercole’s astonishing lines, this time dealing with the fact that only a minuscule fraction of what was clearly a sprawling body of literature has actually survived from antiquity: “The scarcity of copies is not the result of any kind of systemic destruction.”

Your jaw just drops. We’re talking about texts that portray Jesus as a psychotic with supernatural powers, that portray the Disciples as drunken illiterate louts, that portray the early ministry as either a crowd-funded wine-soaked orgy rolling through the Judean countryside or else as something that never actually happened on Earth at all. Of course the early codified church destroyed as many of these documents as it could get its hands on. Of course that’s why so few of them survive. Implying anything else about an organization that had sole and unchallenged control over Western society for fifteen centuries – and which based that control on Scriptural authority – would be the height of naivete if it weren’t so obviously publishing-world circumspection instead. 

“During to [sic] the relative lack of manuscript evidence,” Gathercole writes, “most of what we know about the fate of apocryphal Gospels in the early period comes from the church fathers.” These works were read privately by prelates who wouldn’t read them publicly nor allow others to read them, and a great deal can be learned from their various commentaries. This Penguin Classics The Apocryphal Gospels is wonderfully full of that learning. Here’s hoping even readers in the Bible Belt stumble across it some day.

Stevereads: African Genesis

Our book today is Robert Ardrey’s landmark 1961 book African Genesis: A Personal Investigation into the Animal Origins and Nature of Man, which in its very first line takes aim squarely at two vague and persistent notions: that modern humans originated in the Near East, and that those origins were peaceful, almost idyllic. “Not in innocence, and not in Asia, was mankind born,” Ardrey declares right at the beginning of his book. “Most significant of all our gifts, as things turned out, was the legacy bequeathed us by those killer apes, our immediate forebears.” 

In the course of the book, Ardrey has one particular killer ape in mind: Australopithecus africanus, “the carnivorous ape of the high, ancient veld,” which was first discovered by Raymond Dart, who’s an odd and recurring character in the book. The central struggle Ardrey portrays so dramatically is the struggle to amend what he calls “anthropology’s appalling approach to the australopithecine problem” – amending it, that is, to show an Australopithecus africanus who carefully crafted and ruthlessly used weapons, hoarded food, and very likely made war in its own primitive way. 

These elements went against the grain of common thinking in the discipline when Ardrey wrote his bombshell of a book, but it wasn’t mere iconoclasm that accounted for the wildfire popularity of African Genesis – there’s hardly a parallel to that popularity in our own science-denying era. The book was widely translated, widely discussed, widely debated … and there’s a good case to be made that it inspired an entire new generation of anthropologists, many of whom were eager to question the given wisdoms of the discipline. 

But again, it wasn’t mere iconoclasm that gave this book wings; it was Ardrey’s soaring, passionate prose line. When he writes about modern humans (he immortally describes us as “bad-weather animals, disaster’s fairest children”), he strikes a note that still prompts a deep breath even now, 60 years after the book first appeared:

No creature who began as a mathematical improbability, who was selected through millions of years of unprecedented environmental hardship and change for ruggedness, ruthlessness, cunning, and adaptability, and who in the short ten thousand years of what we may call civilization has achieved such wonders as we find about us, may be regarded as a creature without promise.

Challenging given wisdoms always includes forcing well-established luminaries to eat a certain amount of crow, and Ardrey spent more than enough time talking with such luminaries while working on his book to know the size of some of the egos he was dealing with – and not to care all that much. “A scientist … has the right to be wrong,” he writes. “It is a right approximating an obligation, for if a scientist becomes more concerned with being right than with expressing the convictions of his judgement, then he violates a public trust.” 

That 1961 edition of African Genesis included not only dozens of black-and-white drawings of various animals but also wonderful fold-out charts of deep-time chains of life as they were imagined at the time. The mass-market paperback of the book, which sold boatloads more copies that found their way into every used bookstore in the entire world, didn’t typically have those fold-out features, but the main impact of the book was undiminished. It’s ultimately a story about the wonder of science, and although the science might have advanced in gist and detail since the book first appeared (we have, among other things, genetic analysis that was undreamt of in Dart’s day), that particular exultant tone carries the day:

Man is neither unique nor central nor necessarily here to stay. But he is a product of circumstances special to the point of disbelief. And if man in his current predicament seeks a fair mystique to see him through, then I can only suggest that he consider his genes. For they are marked. They are graven by luck beyond explanation. They are stamped by forces that we shall never know.