The Best Books of 2022: Reprints!

As in all years, an interesting index of the health of the publishing world in 2022 is the breadth and variety of its reprints. These are the books that are most immune to hype; they’re the titles championed and launched most predominantly out of faith that flexible, adventurous readers are out there, ready to try something new or re-assess something they haven’t seen in decades. 2022’s lists were full of vigorous reprints of all kinds. These were the best of them:

10 High Sierra & The Asphalt Jungle by WR Burnett (Stark House) – Wonderful to see these hyperventilating but nevertheless oddly deep noir classics from the author of “Little Caesar.” By deliberately selecting two Burnett works that are now far better known as movies than they ever were as books, the folks at Stark House very cannily draw attention to the originalities of the novels. And although those originalities are, let’s just say, a bit weaker than this author’s few remaining hipster friends might claim (ironically, of course), at the very least they deserve to be assessed independently of Bogey’s shadow.

9 Home to Stay!: The Complete EC Stories  by Ray Bradbury (Fantagraphics) – This winningly dorky volume is a prime example of how unpredictably wonderful the world of reprint culture can be. For the first time, all of the Ray Bradbury stories that were adapted by EC Comics over the years are collected in one lovely volume, on high-quality paper, with artwork by legendary figures like Frank Frazetta, Joe Orlando, John Severin, Wally Wood, and Al Williamson. Bradbury was great fun as a short story writer in the first place; adding these lively (and often strangely passionate) comic book panels only adds to that fun. 

8 The Uncollected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (NYRB Classics) – This volume of 35 pieces by the great critic Elizabeth Hardwick presents readers with a stunning further illustration of the depth of Hardwick’s insights – and the sheer reach of her interests. The obviously perfect companion to the NYRB Collected Essays, this book features even more variety and, at many points, an intriguingly lighter tone that works as a perfect complement to the High Mass solemnity that characterizes a lot of the earlier volume. These pieces have never been collected in earlier anthologies; encountering them again is completely refreshing.

7 The Amazing Spider-Man, Black Panther, Captain America (Penguin Classics) – 2022 saw a marriage I’d been waiting for my entire adult life without realizing it: Penguin Classics reprinting Marvel Comics. For this first batch (of many, we can only hope), the editors chose the original classic Spider-Man adventures written by Stan Lee and drawn by Steve Ditko, a great revivalist run of Captain America by the legendary duo of Lee and artist Jack Kirby, and the odd, did-it-age-well Black Panther run written by Don McGregor (with art by Rich Buckler and Billy Graham). The full-color oversized volumes are instant treasures.

6 Fadeout (Dave Brandstetter #1) by Joseph Hansen (Soho Syndicate) – The good folks at Soho Syndicate are celebrating the mind-boggling fiftieth anniversary of the debut of Joseph Hansen’s gay PI David Brandstetter by re-issuing all the Brandstetter novels with new cover art and new introductions. And once the culture-shock of the re-reading has subsided a bit (Brandstetter is solving crimes in a very different world for gay men than the one gay men in the US inhabit today, although the reading mind naturally notices the things that have stayed the same, or may all too soon return), you’re able to appreciate in new ways the craftsmanship Hansen brought to these stories. That’s one of the many gifts of passion-project reprints like these; they prompt re-examinations of things you maybe haven’t thought about in decades. It’s good to welcome Dave Brandstetter back. 

5 Call Me a Cab by Donald Westlake (Hard Case Crime) – According to the true believers at Hard Case Crime, this slim novel is the last one Donald Westlake left unpublished at his death in 2008, and although it’s just faintly possible that at least one element of such a claim might be a tad exaggerated, it’s still a joy to encounter any Westlake at any time, very much including this snappy, sometimes surreal story about a taxi driver who takes on a job of driving a mystery woman across the country from Manhattan to LA. It’s an oddly static outing from Westlake – not a narrative failure by any stretch (this author couldn’t really ever manage that), but definitely missing some of the weird, sardonic forward momentum of many of this author’s better-known books. Every bit as fun, though. 

4 The Desert Smells Like Rain by Gary Paul Nabhan (University of Arizona Press) – Certainly the most unexpected reprint of the year, for me, was this call back to forty years ago, an eloquent, submersive look at the Tohono O’odham people of the Sonoran Desert. The author’s ability to marry startling eloquence with quotidian details of daily life on the edges of human subsistence is remarkable; it consistently reminded me of the strong impression this odd cult classic of anthropology made on me the first time I read it.

3 Army of the Potomac Trilogy by Bruce Catton (Library of America) – In another reprint event I’ve been waiting for and dreaming about for a long, long time, the Library of America finally inducted the great American Civil War historian Bruce Catton to its list, here reprinting in one sturdy, handy volume Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road, and A Stillness at Appomattox. LOA volumes have an unbeatable array of native features, from archival paper to ribbon bookmarks to a minimum of editorial palaver, and as a result, this volume immediately takes its place as one of the nicest popular presentations of this brilliant author, whose histories read with such headlong bardic power. I can now start patiently waiting for a second Catton volume.

2 The Silmarillion illustrated by JRR Tolkien (William Morrow) – Almost every year sees a few new designs for reprints of JRR Tolkien’s great works, but this year presented readers with something they hadn’t seen before in the US market: a lavish deluxe edition of The Silmarillion with Tokien’s own illustrations throughout. This book has always been both a special treat to Tolkien fans and a genuine head-scratcher to the uninitiated; it’s the collected theology, mythology, and folklore underpinning the legendarium forming the imaginative backdrop of this author’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and as such it has both concentrated episodes of intense dramatic power – and also long stretches that read the Book of Leviticus as translated and adapted by Sir Walter Scott. But for those Tolkien fans, such as yours truly, this volume is a pure gift.

1 Anne Braden Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches, 1947-1999, edited Ben Wilkins (Monthly Review Press) – It’s been over 15 years since the death of the mighty Anne Braden, which makes Anne Braden Speaks, the best reprint volume of 2022, at once so melancholy and arrestingly welcome. Braden was sharply, relentlessly clear-eyed in her assessments of all the vital social issues of her day, from civil rights to nuclear proliferation. In half a century of writing and speaking, Braden made all the right enemies, and the whole time she was producing knotty, fiercely complicated explications of her stances (and demolitions of the stances of the complacent or wicked). The editing on this volume does a wonderful job of unobtrusively positioning those writings for a new generation – one that desperately needs them, alas.