10 Must-Read Books of 2022
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With 2022 coming to a close, we’re looking back at the year in publishing. In no particular order, these are the ten books SwR loved most.
Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan
“The paragraphs of Kathryn Scanlan recall flat plains: they are without ornament, and their candidness may stun you. In Kick the Latch, the geography of Scanlan’s prose echoes the frankness of her narrator: Sonia, a horse trainer. The novel—based on a series of recorded conversations between Sonia and Scanlan—exhibits the power of the unadorned. Through plain speaking, plain writing, Scanlan shows the everyday features of a life to be worthy of recognition.”
—Zach Davidson, senior editor of NOON and contributing editor at BOMB
Valleyesque by Fernando A. Flores
“A psychedelic border landscape of forgotten towns, half-empty cafes, and sun-blasted roads, the Valley of the title is the Rio Grande Valley between Texas and Mexico. In this Burroughsian valley of the dead-living and the living-dead, Flores traces the lives of quietly eccentric artists and writers as they move through a larger, stranger framework, never asking what’s real and what isn’t, nor ever positing that any such distinction exists. Altogether, this valley is a realm not so much of lost souls as of meandering ones, feeling their way along like lines of paint, helping to flesh out a vibrant and complex design that only the reader can appreciate in full.”
—David Leo Rice, author of A Room in Dodge City, A Room in Dodge City: Vol. 2, Angel House, Drifter: Stories, and The New House.
Fruit Punch by Kendra Allen
“With her singular voice and stylistic range, Allen addresses issues of beauty, theology, trauma, Black identity, and childhood with bell-ringing clarity. She deftly brings the reader’s attention to the body and it’s generational truth: how it never lies, always knows, and always remembers.”
—Halle Hill, author of Good Women: Stories (Hub City Press, 2023)
The Night by Rodrigo Blanco Calderón (Trans. Daniel Handler and Noel Hernández González)
“The Night is Rodrigo Blanco Calderón’s first novel, but you might be forgiven to think the Venezuelan author wrote it with the certainty that it would be his last one as well. Such is its ambition and scope, metafictional scaffolding, ever-revolving door of characters, and the cacophony of genres it contains; it’s as if the author wanted to get in everything he likes or, more to the point, everything he’s obsessed with, and that reverence transcends and is contagious. The Night is a tale of tales, of interweaving narratives from which one glimpses the tapestry of a country upon which darkness has fallen. But it’s also a novel about novels—about the strangeness, wonder, and power of the written word.”
—Noel Hernández González, English translator of The Night
Teenager by Bud Smith
“I have a soft spot for bighearted screwups—characters who have ‘totaled their souls,’ as Denis Johnson put it—especially teenage ones, and Kody and Tella are impossibly charming as they careen and rampage across a tilted, twisted version of America, with Smith’s soaring, exuberant prose as their fuel.”
—Kimberly King Parsons, author of Black Light
Jawbone by Mónica Ojeda (Trans. Sarah Booker)
“Near the end of the book, this line appears: ‘You can’t get pregnant by gunpowder, but if you could, you’d give birth to a bullet.’ Jawbone is that mother and that bullet. It births itself, feeds on its questions, kills itself, and is born into language again and again, only to ask something different and take readers deeper into puberty and familial drama—two true horrors of unfathomable darkness.”
—Gabino Iglesias, author of Zero Saints, Coyote Songs, and The Devil Takes You Home
Saint Sebastian’s Abyss by Mark Haber
“Mark Haber has written a cerebral, comic novel about art critics in full colonial-academic mode, desperate to plant their flag on a patch of cultural dirt, define it, and fend off any forces to the contrary—including, as it turns out, each other. It’s funny, this book, from line-to-line. Yet it isn’t a one-liner. Saint Sebastian’s Abyss is about voice. Sustained tone. This is smart telling, a meditation on highbrow culture and criticism, and the bumbling, selfish ruin that can define it.”
—Odie Lindsey, author of Some Go Home and We Come to Our Senses
Family Album: Stories by Gabriela Alemán (Trans. Mary Ellen Fieweger and Dick Cluster)
“Family Album teases tropes of hardboiled detective fiction, satire, and adventure narratives to recast the discussion of Ecuadorian national identity. From a pair of deep-sea divers looking for sunken treasure in the Galápagos Archipelago, to a hired gun accompanying a group of missionaries into the territory of the indigenous people of the Amazon, this series of cracked ‘family portraits’ serves up a cast of picaresque heroes and anti-heroes in stories that sneak up on a reader before they know what’s happened.”
—Mary Ellen Fieweger and Dick Cluster, English translators of Family Album
Campfires of the Dead and The Living by Peter Christopher
“Attention, short story devotees: you will have a new lodestar. Read this book if you need the neural rush that only the best short stories deliver; the kind of story that keeps you desperately chasing the fix from one literary magazine to the next. This book features more than two dozen stories like that—in a row.”
—Conor Hultman, SwR contributor
Here Be Icebergs by Katya Adaui (Trans. Rosalind Harvey)
“A collection of twelve stories whose characters are explored through the use of terse, sometimes fragmentary, language. Furnished with a sense of their life stories, the author positions the reader as observer of an unfolding crisis or rupture of some kind, portrayed with what the translator describes as a ‘fearless looking.’”
—Fionn Petch, English translator for Charco Press
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