Best of 2022
The best entertainment of the year, as chosen by Vultures critics.
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Its a perfect time to pick up a book by a writer youve never read before.
10.X, by Davey Davis
10.
Davey Daviss neo-noir novel reads like a cross between Raymond Chandler and Jean Genet.
The parameters of ones story are personal; the onus of calling bullshit rests on us.J.
Howard Rosier
8.All This Could Be Different, by Sarah Thankam Mathews
8.
7.2 A.M. in Little America, by Ken Kalfus
7.
But to a certain reader BIPOC/ALAANA, diasporic, marginalized thats old news.
2.Easy Beauty, by Chloe Cooper Jones
2.
Its heady but accessible.
1.Manhunt, by Gretchen Felker-Martin
1.
Honorable Mentions
All books are listed by U.S. release date.
The directness of Hetis writing renders even her most twee scenes into something affecting.
And she loved her meager little existence, which was entirely her own.
Maddie Crum
Read Jennifer Wilsonsreview ofPure Colour.
To stave off melancholy another deterrent to work theyre given child holograms and stimulating objects with which to interact.
At one point, the Matriarch disposes of a daughters body not in a casket but with a wheelbarrow.
In this case, the comparison is warranted but also limiting.
Bulawayos book traverses new territory on its own radically creative terms.
My recommendation: Pick this up, leave any preconceptions aside, and dive right in.
There are pluses: Murders are solved, the tragically separated are reunited, children get totrulyknow their parents.
But there are downsides, too, mainly societys collective immersion into a massive entangled web of constant surveillance.
ReadMallika Raos reviewofThe Candy House, by Jennifer Egan, andThe Immortal King Rao,by Vauhini Vara.
Melissa Chadburns is a harrowing and utterly unforgettable story.
Shes a doctor marrying a more senior, even-more-attractive doctor who worships the ground she walks on.
The book is always interrogating perfection, asking if everything peachy is as it seems.
His isolation is interrupted by an unexpected visitor a man who washes ashore.
Everything coheres because of Jenningss immaculate understanding of craft.
Each polished narrative piece perfectly complements the next.
This is a novel of contrasts: understated and bold, spare and sweeping, slender and grand.
Avalon, by Nell Zink
Have you heard?
The Dickensian heroine, Bran, is an orphan at the heart of a smart and funny kunstlerroman.
The first sentence reads, Milan was the first person Feyi fucked since the accident.
It immediately sends the mind spinning.
Was the sex any good?
Like Emezis previous novels,FreshwaterandThe Death of Vivek Oji,the book isnt just about one thing.
), but its also a snapshot into grief many years after a life-changing incident.
The worlds Harlan creates feel both expansively fantastical and palpably real.
Her honesty about their irreconcilable disconnect is electrifying.
You will want to start over so you’ve got the option to experience it again.
By the end, the unjustness of the mother-daughter relationship takes on an unsettling new dimension.
Read Rachel Connollysprofile of author Gwendoline Riley.
A memory of our presence, a memory of our absence.
In these lines one can glimpse the narrative design of this book and its primary obsession.
Long consigned to a drawer, the book has finally been posthumously published (Dunn died in 2016).
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