Critical Notes

Sam Shepard’s Swan Song, and more: Critical Notes for the week of December 4

By Daisy Fried

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photo by Chad Batka/NYT

NBCC Balakian winning critic Parul Sehgal is interviewed by Durga Chew-Bose in SSENSE. 

NBCC VP and Online Chair Jane Ciabattari's BBC Culture column–a global books column with 50 percent American readers–includes Laura Lee Smith's ​The Ice House, a chilling memoir from Maude Julien, journalist and human rights activist Aslı Erdoga's story collection, The Stone House and ​Cuba on the Verge

NBCC member V. Joshua Adams reviews Toril Moi's Revolution of the Ordinary ​for the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

​​NBCC member Julia M. Klein​'s Q&A with Linda Greenhouse, in connection with her new book, Just a Journalist, appears in Columbia Journalism Review. Klein also reviews Joanna Scutts' The Extra Woman for the Chicago Tribune.

​​NBCC member Rayyan Al-Shawaf's review of Mark Mazower's What You Did Not Tell: A Russian Past and the Journey Home appears in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. His review of I Can't Breathe: A Killing on Bay Street, by Matt Taibbi, is in the Christian Science Monitor.

NBCC member Frank Freeman reviewed three books on Henry David Thoreau for America Magazine: Robert M. Thorson's The Boatman: Henry David Thoreau’s River Years, ​Richard Higgins' Thoreau and the Language of Trees, and Laura Dassow Walls' Henry David Thoreau: A Life

Jennifer Kaplan, a student member of the NBCC, interviewed Laleh Khadivi about her new novel A Good Country for the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

NBCC member Hamilton Cain reviews Daniel Alarcón's The King is Always Above the People for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. 

NBCC member Colette Bancroft ​reviews Sam Shepard's swan song, Spy of the First Person, for the Tampa Bay Times.

NBCC member David Cooper’s review of Ruby Namdar’s The Ruined House appears in New York Journal of Books.

Your reviews seed this roundup; please send items, including new about your new publications and recent honors, to NBCCCritics@gmail.com. Make sure to send links that do not require a subscription or username and password.​