Southwest Books of the Year 2021: Top PicksLike this list

11 items

• A Desert Feast

  Celebrating Tucson's Culinary Heritage

  Niethammer, Carolyn J.

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  Tucson is a food city, boasting, as Carolyn Niethammer writes, the best 23 square miles of Mexican food north of Mexico. It is also the first US venue designated as a City of Gastronomy by the United Nations. Why should that be? Niethammer…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Good Map of All Things

  a Picaresque Novel

  Ríos, Alberto

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  A small town nestled in the Pimería Alta of northern Mexico is home to folks as warmly engaging as they are idiosyncratic in this delightful novel by award-winning poet and author Alberto Álvaro Ríos. Midway through the 20th century,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• In the Shadows of the Freeway

  Growing Up Brown & Queer

  Otero, Lydia R.

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  Lydia Otero’s new book gives us a personal narrative of Tucson from the mid-1950’s into the 1960’s. Otero shares memories of life in their family’s thriving Mexican American neighborhood, the events that lead to that neighborhood being…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• On Swift Horses

  Pufahl, Shannon

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  In her stellar debut novel, Pufahl paints a mesmerizing portrait of women and men searching for firm footing in the mid-twentieth century Southwest poised on the brink of cataclysmic transformation. Muriel, the novel’s main character, has…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Postcolonial Love Poem

  Diaz, Natalie

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  Natural wonders, Classical mythology, and crushing desire inhabit this powerful collection by Mojave poet Natalie Diaz. “I carry a river,” she writes. The Colorado “…is who I am... This is not a metaphor...” The poems are physical--fierce,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Reservation Restless

  Kristofic, Jim, 1982-

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  Reading and writing, says Kristofic, are born of restlessness, and it was restlessness that brought him to Coyote Canyon on the Navajo Nation the day he, literally, walked through a rainbow. Kristofic understands the science of rainbows,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Separated

  Inside An American Tragedy

  Soboroff, Jacob

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  An award-winning correspondent takes a deep dive into the malicious origins, gross misapplication, and lasting consequences of what he describes as the Trump administration’s “most spectacular policy fail”--the forced separation and…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Two Desperados

  Stories

  Lowell, Susan, 1950-

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  That Susan Lowell can really spin a tale. A mountain lion tracker in southern Arizona corners an extraordinary animal... and then has to deal with it. A welder who collects grammar-challenged headlines (“Miners Refuse to Work after Death”)…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Desert Notebooks

  a Road Map for the End of Time

  Ehrenreich, Ben

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  Las Vegas, Nevada, is the world capital of the simulacrum, of the meaningless but still entertaining spectacle. Joshua Tree National Park is not without its symbols, including the weird cousin of the rain lily for which it’s named. Both…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Valentine

  Wetmore, Elizabeth

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  The lives of four women become tangled in the harsh West Texas landscape when young Gloria Ramirez stumbles to a remote ranch house, beaten close to death and begging for her mother. Mary Rose, seven months pregnant and “heavy as a Buick,”…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Southwest Books of the Year

  View on pima.gov

  See all picks, past and present.