Members and friends, we’re happy to announce that in honor of our 50th anniversary—and for the first time in our history—we’ll be revealing longlists for our NBCC Awards! The announcements start today and will take place throughout the week. You can find the longlists on our awards page, as well as on our accounts on Bluesky, Instagram, and Facebook. We’re looking forward to sharing some amazing books with you!
Member Reviews/Essays
Tope Folarin reviewed Rumaan Alam’s Entitlement and Scholastique Mukasonga’s Sister Deborah, translated by Mark Polizzotti, for The Atlantic.
Heller McAlpin wrote a roundup of a (heavy) handful of some of her favorite art books of the year for The Christian Science Monitor.
NBCC board member Grace Talusan wrote about nearly drowning in Maine for River Styx.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Craig Johnson’s Tooth and Claw and Christopher Cox’s Woodrow Wilson: The Light Withdrawn for BookTrib.
Charles Green reviewed Eric Idle’s The Spamalot Diaries for DC Theater Arts and Sheldon Collins’ The Legend of Valentine for Blueink Review.
NBCC board member Christoph Irmscher wrote a review for The Wall Street Journal of Katherine Rundell’s Vanishing Treasures and Peter Godfrey-Smith’s Living on Earth. He also reviewed Over to You, by John and Yves Berger, and Marc Marie and Annie Ernaux’s The Use of Photography, for The Art Newspaper. For Counterpunch, he reviewed Arlie Hochschild’s Stolen Pride, and he published a commentary, “Trumpism on Steroids,” in the Austrian newspaper Der Standard.
George Yatchisin reviewed Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz for the California Review of Books.
NBCC board member David Woo looks back on the year’s poetry books at Literary Hub, selecting a few of his favorite reviews from his and fellow board member Rebecca Morgan Frank’s monthly column. He also recommends seven new poetry books, including ones by Kwame Dawes, Farnoosh Fathi, and Paul Muldoon.
Tiffany Troy reviewed Lauren Camp’s Worn Smooth between Devourings for Rain Taxi.
William O’Rourke wrote about Alexander Stille’s The Sullivanians and Salman Rushdie’s Joseph Anton and Knifefor the Notre Dame Review.
Cory Oldweiler wrote about Julia Kornberg’s Berlin Atomized, translated by Kornberg and Jack Rockwell, for the Southwest Review.
NBCC Vice President/Membership and Technology Rebecca Hussey, with co-hosts Frances Evangelista and Dorian Stuber, discussed Ariane Koch’s novel Overstaying, translated by Damion Searls, for the One Bright Book podcast.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed Freda Epum’s The Gloomy Girl Variety Show for Bending Genres.
Randy Cepuch reviewed The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures by Sarah Clegg for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll reviewed Douglas Milliken’s Enclosure Architect for the Portland Press Herald and Rivers Solomon’s Model Home for Reactor, and revisited China Miéville’s The City & The City for Literary Hub.
Tony Miksanek reviewed Small Rain by Garth Greenwell for MedHum.org.
Hope Reese wrote about Fight Right: How Successful Couples Turn Conflict Into Connection by Julie Schwartz Gottman and John Gottman for Greater Good Magazine.
Rhoda Feng reviewed Weike Wang’s Rental Housefor The Boston Globe and Lucy Ives’ An Image of My Name Enters Americaand David Dabydeen’s Sweet Li Jie for the TLS.
Yvonne C. Garrett reviewed Jeanette Winterson’s Night Side of the River for The Brooklyn Rail.
Chris Wolak reviewed Marcia Clark’s Trial by Ambush for Criminal Element.
Maryanne Hannan reviewed Lily Tuck’s The Rest Is Memory for Englewood Review of Books and Shannon K. Evans’ The Mystics Would Like a Word in Today’s American Catholic.
Member Interviews
Ilana Masad interviewed Lily Dancyger about her new book, First Love: Essays on Friendship, for BOMB Magazine.
Susan Wright interviewed Colum McCann about his upcoming novel Twist for Publishers Weekly.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari’s Literary Hub conversation with former NBCC board member and fiction committee chair Anita Felicelli, about her new story collection, How We Know Our Time Travelers, included a thread about
juggling her work life, her volunteer work as an NBCC board member, and writing speculative fiction.
Grant Faulkner interviewed Faith Adiele on the Write-minded podcast about her two chapbooks that are in conversation with one another, Her Voice and Voice Over. The chapbooks were a springboard for a conversation about hybrid writing, hybrid memoirs, the popularity of chapbooks, and hybrid forms.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Peter Ames Carlin about his new R.E.M. biography for InsideHook.
Member News
NBCC lifetime member Susan Henderson’s novel, The Flicker of Old Dreams (HarperCollins, 2018), is included on This House of Books‘ list of the Top 100 Books of the 21st Century.
Sebastian Stockman has made a Book Critics Starter Pack of all the NBCC members and other critics he knows or could find on Bluesky. If you’re not on the list, just DM him on the NBCC Slack or on Bluesky itself, and he’ll add you.
Sarah Dowling published their latest book, Here Is a Figure: Grounding Literary Form, with Northwestern University Press.
For the 18th (and final!) time, Erika Dreifus hosted the Jewish Book Carnival, a monthly event where those who cover Jewish books online “can meet, read, and comment on each others’ posts.” Organized by the Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL), the Carnival has, since 2010, traveled around and been hosted on a different participant’s site on the 15th of each month; as explained within this edition, the project is now sunsetting.
Tiffany Troy was recently nominated by On the Seawall, World Literature Today, and Brooklyn Poets for a Pushcart Prize for her co-translation of Santiago Acosta’s poems “Dead Horse Bay” and “Atlas” and for her poem, “Google,” respectively.
Tahneer Oksman released a lecture series, Why Memoir Matters: Learning from the Lives of Others, through The Great Courses on Audible.
Yana Kane published a translation of Dmitriy Kolomensky’s “War follows in my tracks” in View.Point (Tochka.Zreniya) magazine, a translation of Dmitry Bykov’s “My Shadow Still Remains” in EastWest Literary Forum, and a translation of Dmitry Blizniuk’s “Untitled (you’ve died so many times…)” in Lunch Ticket. Her translation of Blizniuk’s poem is a finalist in the Gabo Prize competition, and her translation of Blizniuk’s “My Fish Will Stay Alive” has been nominated for the Deep Vellum 2025 Best Literary Translations Anthology.