Members and friends, we hope you’re having a great spring! Our members have been busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Ariana Reines, Liann Zhang, Jennifer Neal, Matthew Specktor, and Sarah Demoff, as well as interviews with writers like Betsy Lerner, André Aciman, Dan Nadel, and more.
We’d also like to remind you that applications to our Emerging Critics Fellowships are now open! The NBCC Emerging Critics Program is an interactive, participatory program guided by the philosophy that critical thought can be fostered and enriched through dialogue within a cohort of similarly-interested critics. This is an unpaid mentorship program, with opportunities to publish a review or two during the course of the fellowship year. Apply here by May 10!
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner reviewed Ariana Reines’ poetry collection The Rose for the Poetry Foundation.
Valerie Duff-Strautmann wrote about Srikanth Reddy’s The Unsignificant for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing recipient Steven G. Kellman reviewed Liann Zhang’s Julie Chan Is Dead for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Tamara MC wrote about Julie Brill’s Hidden in Plain Sight for Panorama.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll reviewed Cynthia Reeves’ The Last Whaler for the Portland Press Herald.
Meena Venkataramanan wrote about Brick Lane’s multicultural history as a refuge for Huguenots, Jews, and Bangladeshis, in an essay which references works by Monica Ali, Zadie Smith, and Sam Selvon, for Public Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Amanda Churchill’s The Turtle House, Nanda Reddy’s A Girl Within a Girl Within a Girl, and F.H. Batacan’s Accidents Happen and Other Stories for BookTrib.
Tom Peebles reviewed Azar Gat’s The Clausewitz Myth, Or The Emperor’s New Clothes on his blog.
David Starkey reviewed the ISMs series, edited by Larry Warsh, for the California Review of Books.
Jenny Shank wrote about My Pisces Heart: A Black Immigrant’s Search for Home Across Four Continents by Jennifer Neal for The Emancipator.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Judith Giesberg’s Last Seen and Kathryn Schumaker’s Tangled Fortunes for The Wall Street Journal.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Erik Baker’s Make Your Own Jobfor the California Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member Mark Athitakis reviewed Matthew Specktor’s The Golden Hour for the Los Angeles Times.
Christoph Irmscher, NBCC Co-Vice President for Awards and nonfiction chair, wrote a clutch of reviews for The Wall Street Journal: of Megan Marshall’s After Lives: Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart; Felicity Henderson’s Robert Hooke’s Experimental Philosophy; and Vivian Moller’s Inside the Stargazer’s Palace.
Joyce Sáenz Harris reviewed Sarah Demoff’s The Bright Yearsfor The Dallas Morning News.
Dan Kois wrote about Alan Weisman’s Hope Dies Lastfor Slate.
Genanne Walsh reviewed Elissa Altman’s Permission: The New Memoirist and the Courage to Create for the Portland Press Herald – Maine Sunday Telegram.
For The Tangential, Jay Gabler reviewed Colwill Brown’s We Pretty Pieces of Flesh.
Heather Treseler reviewed poet-philosopher John Koethe’s poetry collection, Cemeteries and Galaxies, in “Of Quirks and Quarks” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Tahneer Oksman reviewed Dan Nadel’s Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Lifefor The Washington Post.
Member Interviews
Grant Faulkner interviewed Shred Sisters author Betsy Lerner on the Write-minded podcast.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled André Aciman for Publishers Weekly.
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed investigative journalist Alice Driver about her book Life and Death of the American Worker: The Immigrants Taking on America’s Largest Meatpacking Company for The Ink.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Dan Nadel about his R. Crumb biography for Publishers Weekly.
Benjamin Woodard interviewed Ethan Rutherford about his new novel, North Sun, for BOMB.
Member News
Jeanne Bonner’s translation This Darkness Will Never End, a short story collection written in Italian by Hungarian-born writer Edith Bruck, is out this week from Paul Dry Books. Jeanne won a National Endowment for the Arts Literature in Translation grant for the project. The 1962 collection is a lost Italian Jewish classic, with the Holocaust alternately looming ahead as a fate that can’t be avoided or as the horror that can’t be outrun. Jeanne would love to send a digital review copy to fellow members who request one via email.
Christine Sneed interviewed NBCC member Kurt Baumeister for The Brooklyn Rail. An excerpt from Kurt’s Twilight of the Gods follows the interview. Also at The Brooklyn Rail, James Fuerst reviewed Twilight of the Gods. On April 23 at 6 p.m. Central, Kurt will be reading from his book and be in conversation with Sequoia Nagamatsu at Moon Palace Books in Minneapolis, and on April 26 at 6 p.m. Eastern, Kurt will have a joint reading/Q&A with Gemini Wahhaj at Politics and Prose’s Union Market location in Washington, D.C.
Jamie Brown has won the Delaware Press Association’s award for Best Chapbook of Verse for his collection Aftermath and Other Poems: A Post/Pre-Operative Journal, which was published last Fall by Moonstone Press in Philadelphia. Culled from nearly two years of work done following his September 2016 aortic dissection and leading up to the June 2018 open-heart surgery necessitated by the earlier emergency. For more information, contact Larry Robin at Moonstone or Jamie.