This was the year that I found myself willing to challenge myself as a reader again, after several years in which all I wanted was comfort food.

[You can also read Slate book critic Laura Miller’s top 10 list here.].

The heroine of this debut novel is a queer Indian American twentysomething living alone in Milwaukee, working a despicable corporate job that eats away at what little soul she has left.

By turns prickly and yearning, Sneha makes her way through good and bad friends, good and bad lovers, and parents who could never understand her—whom she won’t let understand her.

What a drag it was on Mother’s Day, he notes, with teachers and neighbors “tiptoeing around me like I was a sad little ginger landmine.”.

Little, Brown.

This bawdy, angry tour de force is told in the inimitable voice of Carlotta, a trans woman just out of prison after a 20-year stint, back in Brooklyn and looking to transform her life just as she transformed her self.

Hannaham’s fearless novel makes a sharp argument about incarceration and poverty in America in a voice that fizzes with attitude and invention.

In January, just months after the saga of the Bad Art Friend took over the internet, this smart and mean little novel was published, giving a delectable twist to the deathless question of who owns a story.

It’s a commercial thriller that asks: What is the purpose of a book like that.

But the cold, hard facts that Tillman sets down—the resentments, the annoyances, the sorrows, and above all the inexorable collapse of personhood we all must eventually undergo—might just read as gratifyingly realistic to those who’ve lived through their own versions of this story.

The resulting text, transcribed verbatim, makes up Peter Hujar’s Day, reprinted late last year by Magic Hour Press

The names Hujar catalogues in just one ordinary day—Sontag, Ginsberg, Kupferberg, Lebowitz—combine with his photographer’s eye to create a portrait of a very specific moment in American art and his own place in it

I loved this experiment for its glimpse into a world I’ll never experience, and the way it makes conversation crucial to culture

No book I read in 2022 transformed the way I thought about my city, my safety, or the challenges ahead like this vigorously argued chronicle of American negligence

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