Critical Notes

The latest reviews and more from NBCC members

By Michael Schaub

We hope your May is going well so far! To kick off the month, we’ve got several reviews from our members, including our critics’ takes on the latest books by Anne Tyler, Paulette Jiles, Julian Barnes, Bill McKibben and more. We hope you’re all staying safe and sane, and as always, thank you for being a member!

Member Reviews

Carlos Lozada, a winner of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing (and another prize you might have heard of) reviewed Anne Case and Angus Deaton’s Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism for The Washington Post.

S. Kirk Walsh reviewed Paulette Jiles’ Simon the Fiddler for The New York Times Book Review.

Board member Colette Bancroft reviewed Anne Tyler’s Redhead by the Side of the Road for the Tampa Bay Times.

Daneet Steffenslatest Seattle Review of Books column included novels by Deon Meyer, N.K. Jemisin, Sharon Bolton, Stacey Halls, and Jennifer Hillier

Jim Ruland reviewed Nina Renata Aron’s new memoir, Good Morning, Destroyer of Men’s Souls, for the Los Angeles Times.

Martin Gelin reviewed Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Kathleen Stone reviewed Marc Petitjean’s The Heart: Frida Kahlo in Paris for The Arts Fuse and Tola Rotimi Abraham’s Black Sunday for Ploughshares.

Paul Wilner reviewed William T. Vollmann’s The Lucky Star for Alta.

Benjamin Woodard reviewed Matéi Visniec’s Mr. K Released for Words Without Borders.

Ann Fabian reviewed Jon Mooallem’s This is Chance! The Shaking of an All-American City, A Voice That Held it Together for The National Book Review.

Scott McLemee reviewed Federico Finchelstein’s A Brief History of Fascist Lies and Truls Wyller’s What Is Time? An Enquiry for Inside Higher Ed.

Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Square Haunting: Five Lives in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade for On the Seawall.

Dana Wilde reviewed Bill McKibben’s Falter: Has the Human Game Begun to Play Itself Out? and Littoral Books’ A Dangerous New World: Maine Voices on the Climate Crisis for The Working Waterfront and Betty Culley’s novel in verse Three Things I Know Are True in his “Off Radar” column for the Central Maine Newspapers.

Clifford Garstang reviewed Paek Nam-nyong’s Friend for the New York Journal of Books.

Harvey Freedenberg wrote about Michael Bamberger’s The Second Life of Tiger Woods and contributed two rundowns of new books for Shelf Awareness.

Michelle Ainsworth reviewed three books for Skeptic.

Member Interviews

C.M. Mayo interviewed Ellen Prentiss Campbell on writing fiction and her new book, Known By Heart: Collected Stories, for the Madam Mayo blog.

Member News, Etc.

Jay Rogoff‘s new book, Loving in Truth: New and Selected Poems, has been published by Louisiana State University Press. He spoke about it with interviewer Joe Donahue on WAMC Northeast Public Radio’s The Roundtable.

Matthew Jakubowski contributed an essay/fable to 3:AM Magazine’s “3:AM on Lockdown” series.

Joan Gelfand’s new poem “Branded” was published in the spring issue of Marsh Hawk Review, edited by NBCC member Mary Mackey. Joan was also interviewed by The Oregonian about writing a bestseller while sequestered.

Photo by Giancarlo Marseglia Ceccoli via Flickr / CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.