Critical Notes / Announcements

Reviews and More From NBCC Members

By Michael Schaub

Friends, we hope you’re having a good spring! Our members have been keeping busy with reviews of books by authors including Doris Kearns Goodwin, Alexandra Fuller, Judith Butler, Hampton Sides, and more, and interviews with writers like Suzanne Scanlon, Natasha Trethewey, and Emily Raboteau. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!

Member Reviews/Essays

Kitty Kelley reviewed Doris Kearns Goodwin’s An Unfinished Love Storyfor the Washington Independent Review of Books.

For NPR, Carole V. Bell wrote about why Patricia Highsmith’s most famous creature, Tom Ripley, continues to fascinate.

In her Girl Writing column for the Washington Independent Review of Books, Ellen Prentiss Campbell pays tribute to her late friend, the librarian Karen Newton.

Marcie McCauley reviewed Catherine Leroux’s The Future, translated by Susian Ouriou, winner of the 2024 Canada Reads prize, for PRISM international. And she read 2,066 pages of Amor Towles’ fiction to review his recent collection of short stories, Table for Two, for Chicago Review of Books

Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Premee Mohamed’s The Siege of Burning Grass for Locus.

Cory Oldweiler reviewed Susan Page’s The Rulebreakerfor The Boston Globe.

The latest installment of Terese Svoboda’s column, “Two Revolutionary War Proclamations Freeing The Enslaved,” appeared in 3 Quarks Daily.

Celia McGee reviewed Jamaica Kincaid and Kara Walker’s An Encyclopedia of Gardening for Colored Children: An Alphabetary of the Colonized World for The New York Times.

Alexander Pyles reviewed S.A. Barnes’ Ghost Station for the Chicago Review of Books, and wrote about Marilynne Robinson’s Reading Genesisfor U.S. Catholic.

Hamilton Cain reviewed Bill Wasik and Monica Murphy’s Our Kindred Creatures for the Minneapolis Star Tribune.

Carl Hoffman reviewed Will Cockrell’s Everest, Inc.: The Renegades and Rogues Who Built an Industry at the Top of the World for The Washington Post

Douglas C. Macleod Jr.’s “The Suppression of Child Abuse and Womanism in Steven Spielberg’s The Color Purple appeared in Literature/Film Quarterly.

Linda Hitchcock reviewed Jenny Colgan’s Studies at the School by the Sea and Caroline Frost’s The Last Verse for BookTrib.

Michael Sims wrote about his experiences working at Mills Bookstore in Nashville for Chapter 16.

Martha Anne Toll reviewed The Wide Wide Sea by Hampton Sides for The Washington Post.

Heather Treseler reviewed Callie Siskel’s Two Minds for Harvard Review.

Jeff Alessandrelli wrote about independent publishing for the Cleveland Review of Books.

Eric Liebetrau wrote about three Shakespeare-themed books for Kirkus Reviews.

Robert Rubsam reviewed Fine Grabol’s What Kingdom, translated by Martin Aitken, for The Washington Post.

Reginald Harris reviewed Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler for The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.

Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Fi by Alexandra Fuller and Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley for The Wall Street Journal.

Member Interviews

Kathleen Rooney talked to Suzanne Scanlon about her new memoir, Committed, for Chicago magazine.

Elizabeth Lund interviewed Natasha Trethewey, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States from 2012 to 2014, about metaphorical language, memory, and The House of Being, for The Christian Science Monitor.

Anne Charles interviewed poet/scholar Julie Enszer about the posthumous collection of Lynn Lonidier’s poetry, Fire-Rimmed Eden: Selected Poems of Lynn Lonadier, that Enszer edited and published. In the second part of the hour, poet Linda Whalen Quinlan interviewed Enszer about Enszer’s recent poetry collection, The Pinko Commie Dyke: Poems From a Leftist Lesbian Cabal.

Tiffany Troy discussed her full-length poetry debut, Dominus (BlazeVOX), and its mythic setting of Ilium, “where the imaginary, the historical, and the present can coexist,” with Rose DeMaris for Rain Taxi.

Edith Matthias spoke with Emily Raboteau, author of Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “The Apocalypse”, for The National Book Review.

Member News

Sasha Vasilyuk’s debut novel, Your Presence is Mandatory, will be published Tuesday by Bloomsbury.

Heather Treseler’s Auguries & Divinations was reviewed at The Boston Globeand the Poetry Foundation.

Bridget Quinn’s Portrait of a Woman: Art, Rivalry & Revolution in the Life of Adélaïde Labille Guiard published last week, with an excerpt in Hyperallergic.

Sean Carlson was announced by the Elizabeth Kostova Foundation as one of eight writers to be awarded with a poetry fellowship in Koprivshtitsa, Bulgaria, this June.

Terese Svoboda’s story “South Africa in the Sixties” appeared in Evergreen Review, and her story “Accordion” appeared in New World Writing Quarterly.

Focused on sex and shyness and society, Jeff Alessandrelli’s book And Yet was published on April 16 by Future Tense Books. 

“Deserted book store” by elm3r is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.