The NBCC Awards are almost here! We’ll be honoring the best books of 2024 at our ceremony on March 20 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. We still have tickets available for the ceremony, and for the finalists reading on March 19 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern, so get them here while you still can! We’ll also be livestreaming the reading and the ceremony on YouTube.
Also: the NBCC needs your help to run our booth at AWP Los Angeles! Volunteers are needed Thursday, March 27, Friday, March, 28, and Saturday, March 29. Table materials and talking points will be provided. Please email NBCC President Heather Scott Partington at hsp@bookcritics.org with your preferred date(s) (March 27, March 28, or March 29) and shift(s) (8:30 a.m. – 11:30 a.m., 11:30 a.m. – 2:30 p.m., or 2:30 p.m. – 5:30 p.m.). A limited number of AWP waivers are still available for NBCC volunteers. If you’d like to be considered for one, include that in your email.
Member Reviews/Essays
At Words Without Borders, six judges of the 2024 NBCC Gregg Barrios Book in Translation Prize share their appreciations of the six shortlisted titles.
Joan Frank reviewed Lewis Buzbee’s Diver for the San Francisco Chronicle.
Meredith Maran reviewed Emily St. James’ Woodworkingfor The Washington Post.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll wrote about some February books in translation for Words Without Borders, and reviewed Dengue Boy, written by Michel Nieva and translated from the Spanish by Rahul Bery, and Absolution by Jeff VanderMeer, for Reactor.
Charlie Tyson wrote about DOGE and the stereotype of the “lazy” bureaucrat for The New Yorker.
Nell Beram wrote about the screenplays of Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne for Vogue.
Ron Slate reviewed Serendipity by Carol Mavor; A Woman I Once Knew by Rosalind Fox Solomon; Gliff by Ali Smith; and Your Steps on the Stairs, written by Antonio Muñoz Molina and translated from the Spanish by Curtis Bauer for On The Seawall.
NBCC board member Rebecca Morgan Frank reviewed seven new and forthcoming poetry books for Literary Hub.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed Ultramarine, written by Mariette Navarro and translated from the French by Eve Hill-Agnus for On the Seawall, and A Line You Have Traced by Roisin Dunnett for Compulsive Reader.
Parul Kapur’s article “Do Your Research: Using the Tools of Journalism to Write More Vivid Fiction” appears in the current issue of Poets & Writers.
Clea Simon reviewed Deanna Raybourn’s Kills Well With Others for The Arts Fuse.
Robert Rubsam wrote about One Hundred Years of Solitude and Netflix gobbling up world literature for The New York Times Magazine, and reviewed Fragments of a Paradise, written by Jean Giono and translated from the French by Paul Eprile, for the Times Literary Supplement.
Sheila McClear reviewed Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash by Alexander Clapp for The Washington Post.
Dan Kois wrote about Torrey Peters’ Stag Dancefor Slate.
Former NBCC board member and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing recipient Steven G. Kellman reviewed Karen Russell’s The Antidotefor Arts Alive San Antonio.
Ryan Ruby reviewed Perfection, written by Vincenzo Latronico and translated from the Italian by Sophie Hughes, for The New York Times.
Bruce Krajewski reviewed Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel’s Equality: What it Means and Why it Matters for the Ancillary Review of Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Shara Moon’s Let Us March On for BookTrib.
In the latest Brooklyn Rail, John Domini praised Only the Stars Know the Meaning of Space: A Literary Mixtape, linked short stories by Rémy Ngamije.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc reviewed Marcy Demansky’s Hot Airfor The Boston Globe.
Hannah Joyner reviewed Making Sense of Slavery: America’s Long Reckoning, from the Founding Era to Today by Scott Spillman for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Priscilla Gilman reviewed Firstborn by Lauren Christensen for The Boston Globe.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Erika Swyler’s We Lived on the Horizon for Locus.
Tom Peebles reviewed Richard Carwardine’s Righteous Strife: How Warring Religious Nationalists Forged Lincoln’s Union on his personal blog.
Karl Wolff reviewed The Franklin Stove: An Unintended American Revolution by Joyce E. Chaplin for the New York Journal of Books and Hypochondria by Will Rees for The Driftless Area Review.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell reviewed Mornings Without Mii, written by Mayumi Inaba and translated from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed The Voices of Adriana, written by Elvira Navarro and translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, for Southwest Review.
Benjamin Woodard reviewed David Szalay’s Flesh for On the Seawall.
Member Interviews
Kristen Martin interviewed fellow NBCC member Edna Bonhomme about her new book, A History of the World in Six Plagues, for The Baffler.
Grant Faulkner talked with Sari Botton on the Write-minded podcast about her three Substacks—Oldster Magazine, Memoir Monday, and Adventures in Journalism—and her memoir, And You May Find Yourself…Confessions of a Late-Blooming Gen-X Weirdo.
NBCC Vice President/Barrios Book in Translation Prize Mandana Chaffa interviewed Eve L. Ewing about her new book Original Sins: The (Mis)education of Black and Native Children and the Construction of American Racism for the Chicago Review of Books.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Ursula Villarreal-Moura for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Morgan Jerkins and Wally Lamb for Publishers Weekly.
Jake Casella Brookins talked with Dan Hartland, reviews editor at Strange Horizons, about tie-in novels and Timothy Zahn’s Heir to the Empire on the podcast A Meal of Thorns.
Kurt Baumeister was interviewed by Jeremy T. Wilson for the Chicago Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member David Biespiel sat down for an interview with the Philip Larkin Society podcast to talk about Larkin poems, British and American poetry, and more including how Larkin drew him to writing book reviews.
Clea Simon was interviewed about her new psychological suspense novel The Butterfly Trap by Sara DiVello for Mystery and Thriller Mavens and by Caroline Leavitt for A Mighty Blaze.
Joyce Sáenz Harris interviewed William Geroux, author of The Fifteen, for The Dallas Morning News.
Member News
Lily Poetry Review Books has published Hard Bargain, a chapbook of poems by Heather Treseler. The chapbook explores some of the cruxes in women’s lives, drawing on classical mythology, art and medical history, and family lore; it will launch with a 1:45 p.m. reading on March 27 at the AWP Bookfair. A folio of poems from the chapbook appears in this month’s edition of Plume.
Parul Kapur’s debut novel, Inside the Mirror, has been named a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year awards in literary fiction and multicultural fiction.
Betsy Groban participated in an event at the Boston Public Library, defending The Great Gatsby.
Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Godswas reviewed by Aatif Rashid at BULLand Ben Arzate at Bizarro Central. Kurt shared a playlist for his novel at Largehearted Boy.
A preliminary version of Yana Kane’s collection of translations of poems by a contemporary Ukrainian poet, Dmitry Blizniuk, received an honorable mention in the 2025 Stephen Mitchell Prize competition.