Southwest Books of the Year considers titles published during the 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 all—are pleased to offer up their personal favorite titles of the year, complete with brief reviews to whet your appetite and leave you wanting more. 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 PICKS: The stories in Muñoz’s fourth book explore the difficulty and beauty of lives
unfolding between the border towns and agricultural fields of California and
Texas. Muñoz writes with precision and emotional clarity about elemental
problems:…
TOP PICKS: In the Diné nation that is the setting of debut author Denetsosie’s collection,
collisions are frequent and inevitable: between imported religion and traditional
beliefs, between police officers and civilians, between men and women.…
TOP PICKS: The narrator of Justin Torres’s remarkable second novel runs out of options and
ventures to the southwestern desert to find his mentor, Juan Gay, who lies dying
in the Palace, a ramshackle residence for elderly “without family.” “He asked…
TOP PICKS: Damien and Kai, Diné brothers, grew up carefree in a “land where red dust coats
plateaus and sagebrush blooms like winter horse breath,” their mother racing
mile-long trains along I-40 “while Neil Young, Robbie Robertson, and…
TOP PICKS: The final book in Goldberg’s acclaimed mob trilogy (following Gangsterland
and Gangster Nation) features mafioso Sal Cupertine, who’s long been posing
as a rabbi named David Cohen, looking to settle scores and close out a lifelong
career…
TOP PICKS: Larry McMurtry (1936–2021) was a definitive Texan and a champion of its literature.
At various times he made his home in Tucson, Los Angeles, and Washington, but
his books always returned to the hot, dry, windswept landscapes of West…
TOP PICKS: In 2019, journalist Tom Zoellner set off to hike the Arizona Trail, a 790-mile
path running from Utah to Mexico. His chronicle of that journey is filled
with precise, lyrical observations of the state’s diverse, often…
TOP PICKS: As a prelude to his layered collection, Simon J. Ortiz explains that poetry provides
meaning, and ultimately love, through its understanding and collaboration
with the world. Via lyrical appreciation of moments, stories and prayer,…
TOP PICKS: This sparkling photo and essay collection is an outstanding tribute to
Arizona’s classic copper town, redolent of broken industrial dreams and
realized aesthetic visions. Virgil Hancock III does an admirable job of
laying out the evolving…
TOP PICKS: Ira Hayes, an Akimel O’odham man from central Arizona, has long been
remembered not as a war hero but, in the charged words of the country singer
Johnny Cash, as “drunken Ira Hayes.” Writes Holm, a Native American veteran
of the Vietnam…
TOP PICKS: In 1938, Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter took part in a momentous trip down
the Colorado River. The flora of the desert Southwest had never been studied
with any rigor, and Clover and Jotter were among the first botanists to explore
it.…
TOP PICKS: This lovely book of floral photographs, with each plant floating on a black
background, decontextualized and singular like the animals in Joel Sartore’s
Photo Ark, offers close-up and personal images of the blooms of Sonoran and
Chihuahan…
Chronister’s gorgeous and disarming debut novel follows a group of pilgrims
navigating a postapocalyptic landscape in the desert Southwest. The reasons
for the devastation are vague, but the aftermath is vivid: Violent survivalists
populate the…
This spooky collection gives the Southwest’s rich tradition of creepy
folklore the starring role it deserves. La Llorona wails her way through
a desert night in Flor Salcedo’s “La Llorona Happenings,” and a family
of shapeshifting chupacabras uses…
As this tragicomic novel opens, 16-year-old narrator Lara and her mother Yevgenia
arrive at the Oasis Mobile Estates, “in a gulch somewhere between the San Jacinto
and Santa Anas.” Lara’s mother is Russian, and her father is a Black Cuban she
has…
I learned from a young age the tenacity of ruin,” Victoria Nash asserts in
Shelley Read’s debut novel. Read’s picturesque tragedy begins in a Colorado
town soon to be inundated by a reservoir, hiding dark secrets. Victoria is
seventeen, responsible…
“The landscape was meant to be dreaded.” So writes sometime Tucsonan
Shimoda in this blend of poems and prose in a sometimes melancholic,
sometimes incantatory meditation on the evil that people can do. One
leitmotif is the atomic annihilation of…
In a fresh take on an evergreen subject, Gabriel Dozal innovates the borderland
imagery with his imaginative bilingual verse. Tracing the journey of Primitivo
and Primitiva, brother and sister migrants, the poems set up a world divided
by language,…
Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled
member of the Diné. In this debut book, she brings to life her characters and their
many personal struggles. She states that the inspiration for these stories and…
Sylvester is born into the Kiyaa’áanii Clan for the Bilagáana Clan and is an enrolled
member of the Diné. In this debut book, she brings to life her characters and their
many personal struggles. She states that the inspiration for these stories and…
