At this year’s annual meeting, we’ll be discussing the organization of our awards, including the possibility of creating a new prize that would be awarded by a direct vote of the membership.

This meeting is open to all members of the National Book Critics Circle.

In recent years many traditional print book-review outlets have cut back on space—or, worse, disappeared entirely. But the same period has also been marked by the rise of upstart publications that have taken advantage of both the roominess of the web and the tactile pleasures of print to reinvent the literary journal for a new generation. How have these publications changed the way we think about who writes criticism, where it appears, and what shape it takes? Does social media alter what a critic says, and what qualifies as fair game for criticism? And do these new publications signal a growth in opportunities for reviewers after years of decline? We’ll explore these questions with editors at four leading literary journals that are recent arrivals on the scene.

Panelists

Mark Athitakis (moderator) is an NBCC board member whose reviews and essays have appeared in the Washington Post, New York Times Book Review, Washington City Paper, the New Republic, the Barnes & Noble Review, and numerous other publications. He has been a featured guest on book-related topics on Minnesota Public Radio and the Diane Rehm Show, and is founder of the literary blog American Fiction Notes. He lives outside Washington, D.C.

Uzoamaka Maduka is the editor-in-chief and co-founder of “The American Reader.” In 2013, she was named as one of Forbes’ “30 Under 30” for media. She is the former online managing editor of Interview Magazine, and has also held positions with Verso, the London-based publishing house and affiliate of The New Left Review, and Slate.

Alex Shephard is a founding editor of Full Stop. He lives in Brooklyn.

Tom Lutz is the founding editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books, and the author of Doing Nothing, Crying, Cosmopolitan Vistas, American Nervousness 1903, and other works. He has taught at several universities and now is in Creative Writing at UC Riverside.

Emily Cooke is an editor at the New Inquiry and a freelance writer. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in the London Review of Books, the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and n+1, among other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.

This event is free and open to the public.

For the past three years, VIDA: Women in Literary Arts has been conducting a count of how many of the books reviewed by prominent publications were written by women and by men, and how many of the book reviews were assigned to female and male reviewers. The lopsided results have helped begin a conversation about gender bias in the literary world. How can we as book critics and editors address this issue?

Panelists

Laurie Muchnick (moderator) is the book editor at Bloomberg News and president of the NBCC. She has previously been book editor at Newsday and an editor at the Voice Literary Supplement.

Erin Belieu is the author of four poetry collections, all from Copper Canyon Press, including Slant Six, forthcoming in fall of 2014. Belieu’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in places such as The New Yorker, Ploughshares, The Atlantic, Slate and Best American Poetry. Belieu is, with Cate Marvin, the co founder of VIDA: Women In Literary Arts. She teaches in the writing program at Florida State University and is Artistic Director of the Port Townsend Writers Conference.

Pamela Paul was named editor of The New York Times Book Review in April, having served as features editor and children’s book editor. She is the author of three books, The Starter Marriage and the Future of Matrimony, Pornified, and Parenting, Inc. She has written for the Atlantic, The Economist, Vogue, Time, The Washington Post and writes widely for other sections at the Times.

Kathryn Schulz is the author of Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error and the book critic for New York Magazine. Her writing has also appeared in the New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, TIME Magazine, the Boston Globe, Foreign Policy, and the New York Times Book Review, among other publications. In 2012, she won the National Book Critics Circle’s Nona Balakian Prize for Excellence in Reviewing. She was a 2004 recipient of the Pew Fellowship in International Journalism, and has reported from throughout Central and South America, Japan, and, most recently, the Middle East.

Rob Spillman is editor and co-founder of Tin House, a fifteen-year-old bi-coastal (Brooklyn and Portland) literary magazine. He is also the executive editor of Tin House Books and co-founder of the Tin House Literary Festival. His writing has appeared in BookForum, the Boston Review, Connoisseur, Details, GQ, Nerve, the New York Times Book Review, Real Simple, Rolling Stone, Salon, Spin, Sports Illustrated, Vanity Fair, Vogue, Worth, among other publications. He is also the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Writing.

Meg Wolitzer’s novels include, most recently, The Interestings, as well as The Uncoupling, The Ten-Year Nap, The Position, and The Wife, among others. Her short fiction has appeared in The Best American Short Stories and The Pushcart Prize.  Wolitzer has taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, Columbia University, Barnard College and SUNY Stony Brook Southampton. In the fall, along with singer-songwriter Suzzy Roche, she will be a guest artist in the Princeton Atelier program at Princeton University.

This event is free and open to the public.

All’s Fair?: Book Reviews & The Missing Code Of Ethics

Moderated by Marcela Valdes

Should book reviewers be required to follow a code of ethics, the way many other journalists do? The Society of Professional Journalists, for example, publishes a set of guidelines that are widely accepted in the newspaper industry, but book reviewers have no comparable code. Should there be one? If so, what should its rules be? How would it affect bloggers and moonlighting critics-novelists asked to write about fellow novelists, say, or experts asked to assess competitors in their field? Would such a code do anything to restrain the back-scratching and score-settling that can taint current reviews? The panelists will tackle these questions and others as part of an ongoing survey that the NBCC is conducting into ethics in 2013.

Panelists:

Maureen Corrigan (National Public Radio)
Carlin Romano (Chronicle of Higher Education)
Parul Sehgal (New York Times Book Review)
Eric Simonoff (William Morris Endeavor)
Lorin Stein (Paris Review)

The Awards Ceremony is free and open to the public.

Reception to follow at the Lang Center, 55 W. 13th Street, New York. Tickets to the reception are $50.

Confirmed readers include:

Autobiography
Reyna Grande, The Distance Between Us (Atria Books)
Maureen N. McLane, My Poets (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Anthony Shadid, House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), reading by George Hodgman, Anthony Shadid’s longtime editor

Biography
Lisa Cohen, All We Know: Three Lives (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
Tom Reiss, The Black Count: Glory, Revolution, Betrayal, and the Real Count of Monte Cristo (Crown Publishers)

Criticism
Paul Elie, Reinventing Bach (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Daniel Mendelsohn, Waiting for the Barbarians: Essays from the Classics to Pop Culture (New York Review Books)
Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Graywolf Press)

Fiction
Laurent Binet, HHhH, tr. by Sam Taylor (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Ben Fountain, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (Ecco)
Adam Johnson, The Orphan Master’s Son (Random House)
Lydia Millet, Magnificence (W. W. Norton)
Zadie Smith, NW (The Penguin Press)

Nonfiction
Katherine Boo, Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity (Random House)
Steve Coll, Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power (The Penguin Press)
Jim Holt, Why Does the World Exist? An Existential Detective Story (A Liveright Book: W. W. Norton)
Andrew Solomon, Far From the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (Scribner)

Poetry
David Ferry, Bewilderment: New Poems and Translations (University of Chicago Press)
Allan Peterson, Fragile Acts (McSweeney’s Books)
A. E. Stallings, Olives (TriQuarterly: Northwestern University Press)

With Arne Bellstorf, Ruth Franklin, Julya Rabinowich, and Lorin Stein; moderated by Eric Banks and Susan Bernofsky

When a translated work is under review, what exactly is being critiqued? Is it the work itself or the quality of its translation? How does reviewing a translation differ from reviewing a work in its original language? Should the critic be bilingual? An expert in the literature and history of a foreign culture? Join an expert panel of international authors, critics, and translators as they explore the nexus of translation and criticism.

The Awards Ceremony is free and open to the public.

Reception to follow at Lang Center, 55 West 13th Street, 2nd Floor, New York, NY

Tickets for the reception are $50.

Tickets for the membership lunch are $25.

Please join us on March 8 for the annual general membership meeting of the
National Book Critics Circle. In addition to NBCC business, the general
membership meeting includes two panels that you will not want to miss!

10 AM
Digital Galleys/Digital Catalogues/Digital Everything: How Publishers Are
Interacting with Reviewers Today

Panelists Include: Katie Freeman, Publicity Manager, Farrar Straus Giroux;
Peter Miller, Publicity Director, Liveright (Norton); John Oakes, Publisher,
OR Books; Christian Purdy, Director of Publicity, Oxford University Press
(USA); and Susan Ruszala, President, NetGalley

11 AM
YA and Beyond: The Flexible Boundaries of Publishing for Young Adult Readers

Panelists Include: Lev Grossman, Time magazine book critic and the author of
the novels The Magicians and The Magician King; Laura Miller, co-founder of
and staff writer at Salon.com and the author of The Magician’s Book: A
Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia; Ben Schrank, president and publisher of
Razorbill and author of the forthcoming Love is a Canoe; Lizzie Skurnick,
critic and author of Shelf Discovery, a memoir of teen reading, as well as
of 10 books in the Sweet Valley, Alias, and Love Stories series; and Tina
Wexler, literary agent at ICM, representing authors in both the children’s
and adult marketplace.

This panel is open to the public.

Featured reading: Bonnie Jo Campbell, Jennifer Egan, Jane Smiley, Darin Strauss, Isabel Wilkerson, hosted by Jane Ciabattari. Hilton Chicago and Palmer House Hilton, Chicago, Illinois.

SAVE THE DATE

If the memoir craze is over, why is everybody still so obsessed with them and the bestseller lists overstuffed with first person nonfiction stories? Join this lively, candid discussion spilling the inside scoop on the fate and state of writing, reviewing and publishing all different kinds of autobiographies.

Distinguished Panelists Include:

-Tin House editor Rob Spillman

-Lindsay Harrison, author of MISSING

-Her Scribner’s editor Colin Harrison

-Sheila McClear, author of THE LAST OF THE LIVE NUDE GIRLS

-WME Literary agent Rebecca Oliver

-Literary agent Ryan Harbage

-Publishers Weekly editor Mark Rotella, author of AMORE

moderator NBCC member & LIGHTING UP/UNHOOKED memoirist Susan Shapiro

A Litcrawl event with Lev Grossman, Chad Harbach, and Meghan O’Rourke; moderator, Steven G. Kellman; a collaboration with the National Book Critics Circle

Conversation with Parul Sehgal, Beth Gutcheon, Rob Spilman.
Moderated by Jane Ciabattari.

URBAN MIRRORS

The New School and the National Book Critics Circle present

NEW YORK, NEW YORK (AND BROOKLYN AND THE BRONX)

A reading/conversation with NBCC award finalists and winners in prose whose lives in the New York metropolitan area are reflected in their work.

With Darin Strauss, novelist and author of Half a Life, NBCC Award Winner in Autobiography; Lynne Tillman, novelist, essayist, short story writer (Someday This Will Be Funny) and author of NBCC award fiction finalist in No Lease on Life, and David Hajdu, NBCC award finalist in biography for Lush Life: A Biography of Billy Strayhorn, and Positively 4th Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña.

Moderated by Jane Ciabattari, NBCC VP/Onlne, former NBCC president (2008-2011)

Every year, the National Book Critics Circle selects awards in six different literary categories, including autobiography/memoir. In Fall for the Book’s second annual partnership with the NBCC, critic and NBCC board member Marcela Valdes leads a discussion on the popularity and significance of this genre, welcoming several distinguished writers in this field.

Peter Manseau is the author the memoir Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son; the novel Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter; and most recently Rag and Bone: A Journey Among the World’s Holy Dead. He has won the National Jewish Book Award, the Sophie Brody Medal for Outstanding Achievement in Jewish Literature, and the Ribalow Prize for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Mercantile Library First Novel Award. He is also a founding editor of KillingTheBuddha.com and coauthor of Killing the Buddha: A Heretic’s Bible.

E. Ethelbert Miller is the author of several collections of poems; his most recent, How We Sleep On The Nights We Don’t Make Love, was an Independent Publisher Award Finalist. His memoir Fathering Words: The Making of An African American Writer was selected by DC WE READ for its one book, one city program sponsored by the D.C. Public Libraries, and in his most recent memoir, The 5th Inning, Miller returns to “baseball, the game of his youth, in order to find the metaphor that will provide the measurement of his life.”

Ariel Sabar’s debut book, My Father’s Paradise: A Son’s Search for his Family’s Past, won the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Autobiography. His second book, Heart of the City, was published this year. His writing has appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Washington Monthly, and other publications.

Panel moderator Marcela Valdes is the books editor of The Washington Examiner and a contributing editor for Publishers Weekly. She writes for The Nation, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Los Angeles Times, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The Believer, and Bookforum, among other publications. She was a founder of Críticas, the English-language magazine devoted to Spanish-language books.  She is now serving her second term on the Board of Directors of the National Book Critics Circle.

The NBCC panel discussion takes place on Thursday, September 22, at 6 p.m. in Student Union Building II, Rooms 3, 4 and 5.

These authors are among the nearly 150 authors, artists and performers participating in the 13th annual Fall for the Book Festival, September 18-23, at George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus and at venues throughout Northern Virginia, D.C., and Maryland.

To stay up-to-date with the latest news on this year’s festival, bookmark the festival’s webpage here or join the mailing list on the left of the homepage to have information delivered directly to your inbox.

With:
Literary agents Julie Just & Betsy Lerner
O Magazine book editor Sara Nelson
Brooklyn Rail editor John Reed
NY Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus
author David Goodwillie & Scribner’s editor Paul Whitlach
Moderated by Susan Shapiro.
Free admission