The Best Books of 2023: Reprints!

As always, we begin our tournament this time around by pointing out how interesting a factor the strength of a year’s reprint culture can be in assessing the strength of the year as a whole. True, reprints often come about for the opposite of an industry-driven kind of reason: one person at a publishing house finally reaches a position where it’s possible to bring back into print one particular obscure favorite. But just as often, reprints come about for refreshingly corporate reasons: the marketing department of some publishing house determines that there’s a sufficiently likely consumer base for bringing some old title back into print. Either way, it’s always curiously encouraging, and 2023 had its share of intriguing projects. These were the best of them:

10 Divine Days by Leon Forrest (Seminary Offsets)

Bless the folks at Seminary Offsets for bringing out an attractive new edition of this long-forgotten doorstop, the very definition of a forgotten masterpiece. Forrest's sprawling, intensely moving story with its enormous cast of memorable characters is at long last widely available (and in a pricelessly improved and curated edition) – here's hoping this fact changes that “forgotten masterpiece” part.

9 Right By My Side by David Hayes (Penguin Classics)

In a wonderful continuation of their new and adventurous editorial gambit, the folks at Penguin Classics have added this sharp, funny, touching novel by David Hayes on the 30th anniversary of its first appearance. The novel tells the story of teenager Marshall Field Finney as he deals with issues of friendship, family, and of course race in the American Midwest of the 1980s. I'd ordinarily resist both another Bildungsroman and a book being inducted into the Penguin Classics line after such a short time (*ahem* Morrissey), but in this case I gladly make a couple of exceptions.

8 Theodore Savage by Cicely Hamilton (MIT Press/The Radium Age)

Another century-mark: it's been just over a hundred years since the first appearance of this science fiction novel by groundbreaking British author Cicely Hamilton, now re-issued in a lovely edition from the “Radium Age” line of MIT Press. It's the story of a civil service nobody who must fight for brutish superiority in the cave man struggles of the post-apocalyptic world, and Hamilton carves every line in delicious irony that will now be widely available again to a new readership.

7 Nature’s Temples: A Natural History of Old-Growth Forests by Joan Maloof (Princeton)

Again we have a fast turnaround for a reprint, and again the reprint is an expanded, refurbished thing. This new edition of Joan Maloof's brilliant 2016 book about the incredible (and, needless to say, badly endangered) ecosystem of old-growth forests reveals an enormous alien world filled with wonders, all ably illustrated by Andrew Joslin. We can hope the book doesn't ultimately function as an elegy.

6 Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! By Mo Willems (Hyperion Books for Children)

As impossible as it is to believe, it's been 20 years since this children's class by Mo Willems first appeared, telling its deceptively simple story about a pigeon desperately pleading with a Bus Driver to be allowed to drive the bus. This book won the 2004 Caldecott Honor and has taught an entire generation of children about controlling their megalomaniacal impulses – and it's every bit as much fun now as it was 20 years ago.

5 Joanna Russ (Library of America)

Squarely in the middle of our list is one of the most simply pleasing reprint choices of the entire year, a generous Library of America presentation of the best works from the great science fiction author Joanna Russ, at long last. Her Alyx stories are here, and We Who Are About To … and of course The Female Man … all in one sturdy volume, instead of flaking old paperbacks passed around like samizdat treasures.

4 Legends of the Dark Knight by José Luis Garcia-López (DC Comics)

Speaking of treasured samizdat copies: in this fantastic volume, the reprint-shy folks at DC Comics present the great comic book artist José Luis Garcia-López drawing the character he was born to depict: Batman. This volume scans through the vast DC back-catalogue and pulls together dozens of scattered issues from Detective Comics, Batman, the Brave and the Bold, and other titles to fill a hardcover with one of the most influential visual depictions of the character any artist ever fashioned.

3 The Life of Birds by David Attenborough (William Collins)

In another burst of pure joy on the reprint front, we have this wonderful book by the great naturalist David Attenborough, fully illustrated and gently revised and updated. Attenborough is of course prolific on screen and page, but nothing he's ever written has quite the verve and personal enthusiasm of this volume about the birds of the world.

2 The Big Book of Cyberpunk, edited By Jared Shurin (Vintage)

It's been forty years since the science fiction sub-genre of cyberpunk was almost single-handedly created by William Gibson's Neuromancer, and in this over-stuffed, generous volume (another in the utterly winning “Big Book” series from Vintage), editor Jared Shurin brings together dozens and dozens of different takes on the increasingly pertinent 'man becomes machine' theme.

1 Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon)

Here in Anjali Singh's durable translation (and its first English-language hardcover) is the year's best reprint, the 20th anniversary edition of Marjane Satrapi's masterpiece about a young woman growing up in Iran during the revolution – and beyond, as she sees the outside world and then eventually returns home, all done with a pitch-perfect mixture of pathos and cutting humor.