Critical Notes

Reviews and More From NBCC Members

By Michael Schaub

Members and friends, we hope you’re all doing well! Our members have been keeping busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Patti Hartigan, Paul Murray, Ann Patchett, and Yu Miri, and talking to writers like Laura Lippman and Lydia Kiesling. Stay safe, stay cool and hydrated, and as always, thanks for reading!

Member Reviews/Essays

Kitty Kelley reviewed Patti Hartigan’s August Wilson: A Lifefor the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Rebecca Ruth Gould wrote about a new museum for repressed writers in Tbilisi for Index on Censorship.

Barbara J. King reviewed David Scheel’s Many Things Under a Rock: The Mysteries of Octopuses for the TLS.

Cory Oldweiler reviewed We Are Light, written by Gerda Blees and translated by Michele Hutchison, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Dan Kois reviewed Paul Murray’s The Bee Stingfor Slate.

Carl Hoffman reviewed The Bathysphere Book by Brad Fox and The Underworld by Susan Casey for The Washington Post.

Lanie Tankard reviewed The Circumference of the World by Lavie Tidhar as the August Indie selection for The Woven Tale Press.

Sarah McCraw Crow reviewed Ann Patchett’s Tom Lakeand Aomawa Shields’ Life on Other Planetsfor BookPage.

Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed The Rope Artist, written by Fuminori Nakamura and translated by Sam Bett, for The National Book Review.

Tara Cheesman reviewed The End of August, written by Yu Miri and translated by Morgan Giles, for Words Without Borders.

Member Interviews

NBCC Vice President/Secretary Colette Bancroft interviewed Prom Mom author Laura Lippman for the Tampa Bay Times.

Former NBCC board member Marion Winik interviewed Matt Norman (Charm City Rocks) and Rupert Wondolowski (Dreams Are My Social Life) for Baltimore Fishbowl.

NBCC Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari interviewed Lydia Kiesling about Mobility, an oil novel written in the era of climate change, for Literary Hub.

Member News

Marie Myung-Ok Lee’s Hurt You was reviewed by Carol Roh Spaulding at the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Kenneth Gross’ Dangerous Children: On Seven Novels and a Storywas reviewed by Bharat Tandon at the TLS.

NBCC lifetime member Greg Sarris has published a new story, “A Woman Meets an Owl, a Rattlesnake and a Hummingbird,” in Emergence Magazine‘s Shifting Landscapes issue, released in hard copy August 1. The online version is here. The story is an excerpt from Sarris’s forthcoming fiction, The Forgetters, coming in late Spring 2024 from Heyday Books (where the publisher is former NBCC board member Steve Wasserman).

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