Friends, we wanted to let you know that we’ll be celebrating our 50th anniversary at an in-person event at the Brooklyn Public Library’s Dweck Center on Thursday, Nov. 21, at 7 p.m. Eastern. Join NBCC board members past and present, including Michele Filgate, Maris Kreizman, David Varno, Jo Livingstone, Tobias Carroll, and others, who will discuss the borough’s impact on books and criticism over the decades. Thanks so much for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Nicole Yurcaba reviewed Marina Sonkina’s Ukrainian Portraits: Diaries from the Border published for World Literature Today.
Celia McGee wrote about Nora Ephron for The New York Times.
Nell Beram reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Hidden Landmarks of New York: A Tour of the City’s Most Overlooked Buildings by Tommy Silk and They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir by Bruce Eric Kaplan.
Poet, novelist, and essayist Lisa Russ Spaar has published the latest installment in her Second Acts column at The Adroit Journal. Second Acts considers second books of poetry. The most recent is a review of new books by Margaret Ross and Jenny George.
Cory Oldweiler wrote about Lili Anolik’s Didion & Babitz for The Boston Globe and Jim Hicks’s translation of Federica Marzi’s novel My Home Somewhere Else for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Elly Griffiths’ The Man in Black and Other Stories, Shelley Noble’s The Colony Club, and Maira Kalman’s Still Life With Remorse for BookTrib.
George Yatchisin reviewed Gail Crowther’s Dorothy Parker in Hollywood for the California Review of Books.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Wilfrid Sheed’s Office Politicsfor TLS.
Sebastian Stockman wrote about Massachusetts’ Question 2 in A Saturday Letter.
On his personal blog, Tom Peebles reviewed Blaise Cendrars’ A Dangerous Life, translated by David J. MacKinnon and bearing a double subtitle: Sewermen, Bank Robbers and the Revelations of the Prince of Fire, paired with True Tales from the Life and Times of the World’s Greatest Vagabond.
In The Brooklyn Rail, John Domini praised the latest novel from László Krasznahorkai, Herscht 07769, translated by Ottilie Mulzet.
For The Tangential, Jay Gabler reviewed Shelly Mazzanoble’s How to Dungeon Master Parenting.
Member Interviews
Martha Anne Toll interviewed Lilith editor Sarah Seltzer for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Jim Schley interviewed Laura Waterman and reviewed her collection of essays Calling Wild Places Home for Seven Days.
Member News
Daisy Atterbury has published her debut book, The Kármán Line. Described as “a new cosmology” (Lucy Lippard) and “a cerebral altar to the desert” (Raquel Gutiérrez), the book investigates queer life and fantasies of space and place with an interest in unraveling colonial narratives in the American Southwest. It was recently reviewed in The Paris Review as “at once a math-inflected lyric essay; a rollicking road trip; a field guide to Spaceport America, the world’s first site for commercial space travel, located near Truth or Consequences, New Mexico; and a collection of intimate poems.”
Former NBCC board member Rod Davis spoke about the origins of his Korea-based novel, The Life of Kim and the Behavior of Men, as a guest author at the Louisiana Book Festival 2024 in Baton Rouge on Nov. 2. The festival is known for drawing about 20,000 visitors to the State Capitol grounds, in this case despite heavy rain the night before.
Patricia Schultheis’ story “Everything Passing” was a finalist for the short fiction prize sponsored by Orison Publishing.
JoeAnn Hart was interviewed about her new novel, Arroyo Circle, by Tess Callahan for Writers at the Well.
Mary Mackey was interviewed about the symbolism of her apocalyptic Amazon jungle poem “Painted Tigers” by Dichtung Yammer editor Tomas Fink.
“The Last Bookstore” by Thomas Hawk is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.