Hello, friends! Are you considering joining the NBCC? If so, we’d love to see you at an information session/Q&A this Wednesday, June 28, at 5:00 pm Pacific. You’re welcome to ask any questions you have about the NBCC and hear more about our organization. If you’re interested in attending, please email membership@bookcritics.org for more details!
We’re also pleased to announce the 2023 Barrios Book in Translation Prize longlist committee members, who will be joining Barrios VP Mandana Chaffa and board members Adam Dalva and Jo Livingstone in deliberations: Layla Benitez-James, Allison Bulger, Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Rebecca Hussey, Joan Kane, Jennifer Kronovet, Andrea Lingenfelter, Rochelle Spencer, and Elizabeth Wood. Thanks to all of them for their help in honoring our late, beloved board member Gregg Barrios, and highlighting the best in translated literature!
Member Reviews/Essays
For The New York Times, Gaiutra Bahadur reviewed Peace Adzo Medie’s second novel, Nightbloom.
Edna Bonhomme wrote an essay about those who stay in Haiti and those who leave for Esquire, and one about artist and musician Paul Purgas for Frieze.
In his column for the Pride Issue of Kirkus Reviews, former NBCC President Tom Beer wrote about the precarious state of LGBTQ+ literature.
NBCC lifetime member Fran Hawthorne reviewed Daphne Kalotay’s The Archivists for the New York Journal of Books.
Christopher Lancette reviewed David Gessner’s A Traveler’s Guide To The End Of The World for the Washington Independent Review of Books, and Kyle Meyaard-Shaap’s Following Jesus In A Warming World: A Christian Call To Climate Action for EcoLit Books.
NBCC board member Rebecca Morgan Frank reviewed seven new poetry collections for Literary Hub.
For The New York Times, Celia McGee wrote about a new wave of novels that reframe the American West.
Nell Beram reviewed four books for Shelf Awareness: The Devil’s Playground by Craig Russell; The Latecomer by Jean Hanff Korelitz; The Sullivanians: Sex, Psychotherapy, and the Wild Life of an American Commune by Alexander Still;, and The Woman Inside by M.T. Edvardsson.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Martha Hodes’ My Hijacking for the Forward.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Sarah Viren’s To Name the Bigger Lie for The Washington Post.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Stephen P. Kiernan’s The Glass Chateau for BookTrib.
Hamilton Cain reviewed Charles Portis’ Collected Works for The Atlantic; Frieda Hughes’ George: A Magpie Memoir for The Wall Street Journal, and Domenico Starnone’s The House on Via Gemito Street, translated by Oonagh Stransky, for On the Seawall.
Three NBCC members have articles in the summer 2023 print edition of Rain Taxi Review of Books: Steven G. Kellman reviewed A Kidnapped West: The Tragedy of Central Europe by Milan Kundera; Chris Barsanti reviewed City of Blows by Tim Blake Nelson; and Tiffany Troy reviewed Triptychs by Sandra Simonds.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Lorrie Moore’s I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home for The National Book Review and Ellie Banks’s One Little Spark for All About Romance.
Member Interviews
Dan Kois wrote a profile of Lorrie Moore for The New York Times Magazine.
Anne Charles interviewed Mecca Jamilah Sullivan on the Vermont cable access show All Things LGBTQ. They discussed Sullivan’s novel Big Girl, recently released in paperback.
Julia M. Klein interviewed Kay Redfield Jamison about Fires in the Dark for Johns Hopkins Magazine.
Terese Svoboda and Jim Ruland were in conversation at the Los Angeles Review of Books.
For his longform political radio program This Is Hell, broadcast on Chicago’s WNUR, Chuck Mertz interviewed NBCC member Gaiutra Bahadur about her Boston Review essay, “Unmaking Asian Exceptionalism.” Van Jackson, a senior lecturer of international relations at Victoria University at Wellington, New Zealand, also interviewed Gaiutra about the essay for The Un-diplomatic Podcast.
For the Book Cougars podcast, NBCC member Chris Wolak and Emily Fine spoke with Bethanne Patrick about her new memoir, Life B: Overcoming Double Depression.
NBCC Vice President/Emerging Critics Fellowship and Online Michael Schaub interviewed Kelly Link and Megan Abbott for the Orange County Register.
Photo by Cody Geary via Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.