Southwest Books of the Year considers titles published during the previous calendar year that are about Southwest subjects, or are set in the Southwest.
The Southwest Books of the Year panel of reviewers—subject specialists and voracious consumers of Southwest literature—are pleased to offer up their personal favorite titles of the year, complete with brief reviews. Books selected by two or more panelists become Southwest Books of the Year Top Picks, our designation for the best of the best. Their choices are published in our annual publication, Southwest Books of the Year.
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TOP PICK: Across her three-decade career, Millet has specialized in concocting stories about domestic life that initially feel strange but, in her hands, increasingly feel like our natural lived reality. The setup of her twelfth novel is weird,…
TOP PICK: "This was a weird one, and weird ones meant trouble." So writes Dan Stuart near the opening of Marlowe's Revenge, the last of a trilogy. He's right, of course. Stuart has had plenty of experience in weird climes. As leader of the legendary…
TOP PICK: Straight's ninth novel is a sweeping epic set in California's Imperial Valley, the desert region between Los Angeles and the Arizona border, populated by a multitude of memorable characters. A motorcycle officer's determination to adhere…
TOP PICK: The characters in Louis’s sharp debut collection are generally Navajo men who've hit the skids somewhere around Flagstaff. They work construction but can't get ahead. They're struggling to get clean, but temptation stalks them. They want…
TOP PICK: Is any Tucsonan as beloved as Linda Ronstadt? Likely not, and her celebration of the Sonoran Desert will help cinch the deal. She rightly insists that Sonora, the Mexican state, is an integral part of our region, a picturesque font of…
TOP PICK: Self-taught artist Michael Chiago bases his paintings on the O'odham practices he witnessed and his conversations with elders about a past that preceded him. Born in 1946, he grew up on the reservation and started drawing when he was sent…
TOP PICK: The US Border Patrol is often thought of solely as a fixture of America's southern border, but its role is much wider and more troublingly powerful. Its jurisdiction includes all US territory within 100 miles of a border. Court rulings…
TOP PICK: In this memoir, poet and writer Javier Zamora, who lives in Tucson, details his migratory journey from El Salvador to the U.S. He tells the story from the perspective of Chepito, Zamora's 9-year-old self. His grandfather in El Salvador…
Emerson's debut novel is a remarkable balancing act. It's a gritty detective story set in Albuquerque, where Rita
Todacheene, a police crime scene photographer, is compelled to follow a lead on a brutal murder. It's a coming-of-age story about how…
A richly written caper that starts with the robbery of a marijuana dispensary by a couple of losers and ends with a splash of blood in the movie ghost town of Calico. Debut author J.D. O’Brien is already a master of the neonoir genre with a skillful…
"To be a poet you must have gratefulness / at the center of your mission to write." So says Baca, who is grateful for many things: family, language, the New Mexico earth. Gratitude doesn't mean acquiescence, and in this collection of poems Baca…
Although a number of essays focus on other places, writer Raquel Gutiérrez also provides us insight into Tucson, Arizona, and the Sonoran Desert where they currently live. Offering a deep appreciation of the environment,
Gutierrez writes about…
The Southwest was a tableau of delight, confusion, and horror for some of the first Europeans to lay eyes on it, and they reached for comparisons they could understand. The men on the expedition of García López de Cárdenas to the Grand Canyon in…
This readable diverse collection of essays, excerpts, poems, and testimonials to the first wilderness area ever created in the United States is timely and sorely needed as federal public lands become all the more crucial as carbon storers and…
“Revolutions are hard to schedule.” True, but whenever a dictator takes power, a resistance is born. Consider Porfirio Díaz, the constitution-shredding president of Mexico from 1888 to 1915. Against him, among many other leaders, stood the brilliant…
On November 4, 2019, a convoy of women and children was ambushed on a road in the Sierra Madre of northern
Mexico. Nine died. Members of two communities founded by fugitive Mormon polygamists, the victims had seemingly fallen afoul of one of…
Vigilantes arise, the theory has it, when law enforcement is inadequate to protect property or personal interests. But what if the vigilantes, styling themselves as anti-immigrant paramilitaries, are themselves criminals? That's just what happened…
As a boy growing up in Tucumcari, New Mexico, in 1935, future history professor David Stratton was there when
one of the most respected men in town stepped off the Rock Island Railroad to announce the building of a nearby dam. It was a signal event…
Artist Michael Moore, based in Oracle, Arizona, teams up with Paul Gold to produce this eye-catching catalog of fifty of Moore's photo-realistic charcoal drawings. He has long been known as a formidable Southern Arizona artist and art educator, and…
Spirals, "the shape of the wind." Starbursts. Hands, "markers of ancestry." Suns. Bighorn sheep, a prayer for a good hunt to come. The ancient vocabulary of rock art, of petroglyphs and pictographs, is remarkably similar around the world, and still…
