Welcome to the annual Locus Recommended Reading List!
We are so pleased to share this list of excellent fiction! Published in Locus magazine’s February 2023 issue, the list is assembled by Locus editors, columnists, outside reviewers, and other professionals and well-known critics of genre fiction and non-fiction. We looked at 982 titles from 2022 in short fiction and long fiction. The final recommendations, trimmed down to a somewhat reasonable-length list, are our best recommendations for your consideration. We know there will be titles you loved that do not appear here; it happens every year. Any one of our recommending group would have put together a different exact list, but this is the combined sum of opinions, assessed with great affection and care for the field. There were a lot of great books this year; we could’ve recommended twice as many.
COLLECTIONS
- Chasing Whispers, Eugen Bacon (Raw Dog Screaming)
- The Adventurists, Richard Butner (Small Beer)
- Dark Breakers, C.S.E. Cooney (Mythic Delirium)
- Memory’s Legion: The Complete Expanse Story Collection, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK)
- Lesser Known Monsters of the 21st Century, Kim Fu (Tin House)
- The Nectar of Nightmares, Craig Laurance Gidney (Underland)
- Night Shift, Eileen Gunn (PM)
- The Dark Ride: The Best Short Fiction of John Kessel, John Kessel (Subterranean)
- Breakable Things, Cassandra Khaw (Undertow)
- We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow and Other Stories, Margaret Killjoy (AK)
- Corpsemouth and Other Autobiographies, John Langan (Word Horde)
- All Nightmare Long, Tim Lebbon (PS)
- Geometries of Belonging, R.B. Lemberg (Fairwood)
- Bliss Montage, Ling Ma (Farrar, Straus, Giroux; Text)
- Stealing God and Other Stories, Bruce McAllister (Aeon)
- Hard Places, Kirstyn McDermott (Trepidatio)
- The Inconceivable Idea of the Sun, Anil Menon (Hachette India)
- Boys, Beasts & Men, Sam J. Miller (Tachyon)
- The Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer, Janelle Monáe et al. (Harper Voyager US; Harper Voyager UK)
- Illuminations, Alan Moore (Bloomsbury USA; Bloomsbury UK)
- Liberation Day, George Saunders (Random House; Bloomsbury UK)
- Our Fruiting Bodies, Nisi Shawl (Aqueduct)
- The Best of Lucius Shepard: Vol. 2, Lucius Shepard (Subterranean)
- Utopias of the Third Kind, Vandana Singh (PM)
- You Fed Us to the Roses, Carlie St. George (Robot Dinosaur)
- Where You Linger & Other Stories, Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam (Vernacular)
- Spontaneous Human Combustion, Richard Thomas (Keylight)
- All the Hometowns You Can’t Stay Away From, Izzy Wasserstein (Neon Hemlock)
