Criticism & Features

NBCC Reads

Around the World on a Monday with the NBCC

By NBCC


Recent NBCC finalist Susan Faludi is profiled at the Guardian, which also runs long excerpts from The Terror Dream, here and here.

NBCC member Chuck Leddy reminds that Lincoln grabbed nearly as much executive power as George W. Bush.

The VQR symposium on Ryzsard Kapuscinski is worth checking out.

NBCC winner Carol Brightman reviews three memoirs of the 1960s.

Former Balakian winner (and board member) Maureen McLane says Daniel Walker Howe’s “What Hath God Wrought,” a recent finalist for the NBCC award in nonfiction, is “a stunning synthesis of work in economic, political, demographic, social and cultural history, and he gives a fascinating, richly detailed portrait of the U.S. as its very boundaries so dramatically and often violently shifted.”

The NBCC’s other Balakian winning board member, David Orr, admires the technician in Matthea Harvey, and especially the two long poems at the heart of “Modern Life,” which was recently shortlisted for our poetry prize.

Soledad Santiago reviews “The Flowers,” a new novel by former NBCC finalist Dagoberto Gilb. “Not since James M. Cain’s “The Postman Always Rings Twice” has the unspoken so crackled with sexual tension,” she writes.

Member Steve Burt takes a long, deep look at the work of Robert Creeley.

Naomi Klein, who turned up recently on the NBCC’s Good Reads list, remembers those fateful terms: “ownership society.”

If you missed it last week, check out Charles Baxter’s piece on William T. Vollmann’s “Europe Central.”