Members and friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been busy this past week reviewing books by authors including Ocean Vuong, Daniel Kehlmann, Claire Hoffman, and Sophy Roberts, and interviewing writers like Esteban Rodríguez, Karen E. Bender, and Nicole Graev Lipson. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner wrote about Michelangelo Antonioni’s film The Passenger, in honor of its 50th anniversary, for The Sewanee Review, and reviewed Mikio Naruse’s film Floating Clouds for Reverse Shot.
DW McKinney wrote about trends in romance cover design, and featured a few romance cover artists as well, for Publishers Weekly.
Laura Villareal reviewed Divination With a Human Heart Attached by Emily Stoddard, Fabulosa by Karen Rigby, and Tripas by Brandon Som in an omnibus review, “The Peculiar Particular,” for West Branch.
Erick Verran reviewed Jenny George’s After Image; Carl Phillips’ Scattered Snows, to the North; and Jacob Eigen’s The Twenty-First Century for the Cleveland Review of Books; and Karen Solie’s Wellwater for On the Seawall.
Heller McAlpin reviewed Ocean Vuong’s The Emperor of Gladness for The Christian Science Monitor.
David Starkey reviewed Expatriates of No Country: The Letters of Shirley Hazzard and Donald Keene, edited by Brigitta Olubas; Golden State: The Making of California by Michael Hiltzik; and American Artifacts by Matt Black for the California Review of Books.
Rhoda Feng reviewed Tom McAllister’s It All Felt Impossiblefor the TLS and Yiyun Li’s Things in Nature Merely Growfor The Boston Globe.
Carl Hoffman reviewed Sophy Roberts’ A Training School for Elephants: Retracing a Curious Episode in the European Grab for Africa for The Washington Post.
Dean Rader reviewed Tacita Dean’s Why Cy for The Brooklyn Rail.
Clark Bouwman reviewed John Brandon’s Penalties of June for The Arts Fuse and wrote about the works of T.C. Boyle for The Dreaming Machine.
Former board member Mark Athitakis contributed to the Los Angeles Times‘ list of summer reading recommendations.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Eternal Summer, written by Franziska Gänsler and translated from the German by Imogen Taylor, for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Aiden Hunt reviewed Henry V: The Astonishing Triumph of England’s Greatest Warrior King by Dan Jones for NewPages.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Only Smoke, written by José Millás and translated from the Spanish by Thomas Bunstead and Daniel Hahn, for Words Without Borders.
Sebastian Stockman shared the graduation address he gave to students in his department in A Saturday Letter.
Julia M. Klein reviewed The Director, written by Daniel Kehlmann and translated from the German by Ross Benjamin, for the Los Angeles Times, and Last Twilight in Parisby Pam Jenoff for The Pennsylvania Gazette.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Ley Lines by Tim Welsh and One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This by Omar El Akkad for the California Review of Books.
Ruth Joffre reviewed Debbie Urbanski’s Portalmania for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Ann Fabian reviewed Claire Hoffman’s Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous Life and Mysterious Disappearance of Aimee Semple McPherson for The National Book Review.
Marcie Geffner reviewed City of Fiction by Yu Hua, translated from the Chinese by Todd Foley, for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Alina Stefanescu’s essay ““Both Apply”: A Reader’s Notes on Paul Celan’s Letters,” on the NYRB publication of Paul’s letters to Gisele, was published at Air/Light. Alina also has a general review essay of voices in poetry right now, titled “No Place,” in the current issue of Poetry Birmingham.
Member Interviews
NBCC lifetime member Heather Green interviewed visual poet Monica Ong for Asymptote’s visual section.
Tiffany Troy interviewed poets Scott Ferry, Geoffrey Gatza, Jason Koo, Jennifer Martelli, and Dwaine Rieves as well as scholar Sophie Maríñez and novelist Sameer Pandyafor in Issue 35 of Tupelo Quarterly, which also featured the work of hybrid writer Ananda Naima González and poet Esther Lin.
Laura Villareal interviewed Esteban Rodríguez about his ninth poetry collection, The Lost Nostalgias, for Letras Latinas Blog 2.
Rhoda Feng interviewed Jamieson Webster for Liberties.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari’s Literary Hub conversation with Karen E. Bender focused on channeling contemporary anxieties through speculative fiction in her new collection, The Words of Dr. L. and Other Stories.
Former board member Mark Athitakis interviewed Ocean Vuong for Kirkus Reviews.
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed Jaz Brisack about their new book, Get on the Job and Organize, for his newsletter, Reframe Your Inbox.
Grant Faulkner interviewed fellow NBCC member Nicole Graev Lipson on Memoir Nation; the two discussed her new memoir-in-essays, a type of bibliomemoir, Mother and Other Fictional Characters.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Helen Schulman for Publishers Weekly.
Member News
George Yatchisin has been appointed Poet Laureate of Santa Barbara, California, for 2025–2027.
Sasha Vasilyuk’s novel Your Presence Is Mandatory (Bloomsbury) is the winner of the California Book Award – First Fiction.
John Skoyles’ poem “The Beginning” was published in the June issue of The Nation.
Jeanne Bonner will read from her translation, This Darkness Will Never End, at the Italian Cultural Institute in New York on May 28 at 6 p.m. The book, a short story collection written in Italian by Hungarian-born writer and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck, was published by Paul Dry Books in April. Jeanne won a National Endowment for the Arts Literature in Translation grant for the project. For more information on the event, visit this link.
Tiffany Troy’s translation of Santiago Acosta’s “The Miner’s Daughter” from the Spanish was published in Ecozon@.
“Library card catalog” by AKT.UZ: Axborot-kutubxona tizimlari is licensed under CC0 1.0.