Members and friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been getting through the dog days of summer with reviews of books by authors including Sarah Manguso, Fiona McFarlane, Jodi Picoult, and Syou Ishida, and interviews with writers Ian Frazier, Danez Smith, and Patrick Errington. Stay cool, stay safe, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner reviewed Sarah Manguso’s Liars for The Sewanee Review.
Julia Flynn Siler’s first-person essay on becoming a competitive rower in her sixth decade—after surviving a life-threatening medical condition—was published in National Geographic.
Former NBCC board member Steve Paul reflected on the literary legacy of Evan S. Connell, subject of his recent biography, for Literary Hub.
Betsy Groban’s essay celebrating the 100th anniversary of the review journal The Horn Book appeared in its July-August issue.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed North Woods by Daniel Mason for Ecolit Books.
NBCC board Member May-lee Chai reviewed Lola Milholland’s unique memoir, Group Living and Other Recipes, which combines chapters about the author’s hippie parents and her own experiences with communal living with scalable recipes, for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Julia M. Klein reviews Aaron Kreuter’s Rubble Children for the Forward.
Hamilton Cain reviewed Fiona McFarlane’s Highway Thirteenand Arik Kershenbaum’s Why Animals Talkfor The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Rebecca Ruth Gould reviewed Nasser Abu Srour’s The Tale of A Wall, translated by Luke Leafgren, for The New Arab.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Spencer Quinn’s A Farewell to Arfs for BookTrib.
Tom Peebles reviewed T. D. Allman’s In France Profound: The Long History of a House, a Mountain Town, and a People for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Heller McAlpin reviewed Jodi Picoult’s By Any Other Name for The Christian Science Monitor and Jane Campbell’s Interpretations of Love for NPR.
Nicole Yurcaba reviewed Syou Ishida’s We’ll Prescribe You a Cat, translated by E. Madison Shimoda, for Tupelo Quarterly and Eugene Lim’s Fog and Car for Heavy Feather Review. Her review of Tamar Jacoby’s Displaced: The Ukrainian Refugee Experience and the anthology Writing Under Fire: Poetry and Prose from Ukraine and the Black Country appeared at Sage Cigarettes.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Jared Pechaček’s The West Passage for Locus.
Karl Wolff reviewed Mary and the Rabbit Dream by Noemi Kiss-Deaki for The Driftless Area Review.
Member Interviews
Dan Kois wrote a profile of Ian Frazier for Slate.
NBCC Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize Mandana Chaffa interviewed Danez Smith about their collection Bluff.
The Los Angeles Review published a double feature of Patrick Errington’s The Swailing with review by Clelia Albano and interview by NBCC member Tiffany Troy.
Member News
Rebecca Foust’s new chapbook, Shine & Blur, A Love Story in 1984 2024, was chosen by Allison Joseph as runner-up for the Backbone Press 6th Annual Chapbook Contest, and will be released Oct. 1, on the eve of the next election. Inspired by George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, the poems use the lens of the love story between Winston and Julia to focus on the disturbing parallels between their totalitarian dystopia and our emerging political landscape. Rebecca also won first place in the Five Points 2024–2025 James Dickey Prize for Poetry.
Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations (2024) has received the 2024 Sheila Margaret Motton Book Prize from the New England Poetry Club for the best collection of poems published in the past two years.
“Typewriter” by Keith H is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.