Members and friends, we hope you’re all doing well! If you’re going to be in New York this coming weekend for the Brooklyn Book Festival, we’d love to see you at our panel featuring our board member Lauren LeBlanc, hosting a John Leonard Prize conversation with authors Tess Gunty (The Rabbit Hutch) and Zain Khalid (Brother Alive) at Community Bookstore on Friday, Sept. 27, at 6 p.m. Eastern.
We also have three more events coming up! Mandana Chaffa, Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize, will talk with Maureen Freely, translator of Cold Nights of Childhood by Tezer Özlü, winner of the 2023 Barrios Prize on Zoom on Wednesday, Oct. 9, at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Registration is required; you can do so here.
Later that month, we’ll be hosting a wide-ranging interactive roundtable conversation about the future of book criticism at Litquake in San Francisco onFriday, Oct. 25, at 7 p.m. Pacific. Then we’re headed to Massachusetts for the Boston Book Festival, where we’ll be hosting a panel in celebration of our 50th anniversary, on Saturday, Oct. 26, at 11:30 a.m. Eastern.
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner reviewed Eva Baltasar’s Boulder, translated by Julia Sanches, for The Sewanee Review blog.
Sean Carlson’s review of Colm O’Shea’s short story “Feeling Gravity’s Pull” in The Stinging Fly was published in the September issue of Split Lip Magazine.
NBCC board member Christoph Irmscher wrote an essay for The Art Newspaper marking the occasion of painter Caspar David Friedrich’s 250th birthday, reviewing two massive new exhibition catalogues (of shows in Berlin and Hamburg).
Tiffany Troy wrote about translating Santiago Acosta’s poetry, which was included in Constellations: Latin American Voices in Translation, for the Columbia University Press blog.
Ron Slate reviewed The Age of Loneliness by Laura Marris, Mortevivum by Kimberly Juanita Brown, Immediacy by Anna Kornbluh, and Hitler’s People by Richard J. Evans for On The Seawall.
NBCC board member Jacob M. Appel reviewed Robert Kiltzman’s Doctor, Will You Pray for Me?: Medicine, Chaplains, and Healing the Whole Person for Health and Social Care Chaplaincy.
Roxana Robinson wrote about why she stopped dyeing her hair for The Wall Street Journal.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Kwei Quartey’s The Whitewashed Tombs for BookTrib.
Hannah Weber reviewed If Only by Vigdis Hjorth, translated by Charlotte Barslund, for Words Without Borders.
Tom Peebles reviewed Wolfram Eilenberger’s The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times, translated by Shaun Whiteside, for the American University of Paris’ Tocqueville 21 blog.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Ronald Balson’s A Place to Hide for the Forward, Sebastian Smee’s Paris in Ruins for The Boston Globe, and Jean Hanff Korelitz’s The Sequel for Dartmouth Alumni Magazine.
Tara Cheesman reviewed Yoko Ogawa’s Mina’s Matchbox, translated by Stephen B. Snyder, for On the Seawall.
Nicole Yurcaba reviewed Andrey Kurkov’s Our Daily War for Hominum and Vincent Czyz’s Sun Eye Moon Eye for Heavy Feather Review.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc reviewed Sally Rooney’s Intermezzofor The Boston Globe.
Wayne Catan reviewed Magdaléna Platzová’s Life After Kafka, translated by Alex Zucker, for On the Seawall.
George Yatchisin reviewed Francine Prose’s 1974 for the California Review of Books.
Heidi Seaborn contributed a mini-review of Martha Silano’s This One We Call Ours to The Adroit Journal’s fall book recommendations feature.
Tony Miksanek reviewed x-ray by Nicole Lobdell for MedHum.org.
Nell Beram reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Death at the Sanatorium by Ragnar Jónasson and We Solve Murders by Richard Osman.
Member Interviews
For her Literary Hub conversation series, NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari covered the challenges and rewards of chronicling beauty and danger of the desert in Lena Valencia‘s first story collection, Mystery Lights; writing speculative fiction in the time of AI with Helen Phillips, author of Hum; crafting a philosophical spy novel for an age of environmental anxiety with Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake; and how Rumaan Alam created a fictional world revolving around the one percent in Entitlement.
Farooz Rather interviewed Leila Aboulela for PRISM. This is his third interview (after Siddhartha Deb in The Nation and Isabella Hammad in BOMB) in his series of 12 conversations with writers around the world who are doing interesting things with/to the Global Novel. Next up is Joseph O’Neill, with whom he talked about Godwin.
Tiffany Troy interviewed Brandon Shimoda about The Afterlife Is Letting Go for Tupelo Quarterly.
Tamara MC interviewed Tia Levings for Brevity Blog.
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed Brigid Schulte about her new book, Over Work, for his newsletter, Reframe Your Inbox.
NBCC Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize Mandana Chaffa interviewed Idra Novey about her collection Soon and Wholly for the Chicago Review of Books.
Member News
Erika Dreifus’ “Words Are All That I Have: A Found Poem” has been published as part of the Jewish Book Council’s Witnessing series, “which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.”
John Domini’s first novel, Talking Heads: 77, appeared in Italian translation in mid-August, on Arkadia Editore. The book received good reviews, and John did a late-summer promotional tour around Italy.
The Abduction (White Pine Press), Hélène Cardona’s translation of Le Rapt by Maram Al-Masri, is listed among “Reads for the Rest of Us: The Best Poetry of ’23-’24” in Ms. Magazine. Other NBCC members included in the list are Tess Taylor (Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them) and Victoria Chang (With My Back to the World: Poems).
“Brooklyn Public Library” by Erik Stattin is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.