Members and friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Robert Macfarlane, Edward St. Aubyn, Maria Reva, Taylor Jenkins Reid, and Marcy Dermansky, and interviews with Ocean Vuong, Jess Walter, Brian DeCubellis, and Ethan Sacks. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Daegan Miller reviewed Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? for Literary Hub.
Ron Slate reviewed the novels Near Distance, written by Hannah Stoltenberg and translated from the Norwegian by Wendy H. Gabrielsen, The Holy Innocents, written by Miguel Delibes and translated from the Spanish by Peter Bush; and Paris, So To Speak, written by Navid Kermani and translated from the German by Wieland Hoban for On The Seawall.
Jake Kline reviewed Edward St. Aubyn’s Parallel Linesfor The Washington Post.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Attachments: Essays on Fatherhood and Other Performances by Lucas Mann for The Providence Eye.
Nell Beram reviewed four books for Shelf Awareness: And Introducing Dexter Gaines by Mark B. Perry; Theater Kid: A Broadway Memoir by Jeffrey Seller; Walk Like a Girl by Prabal Gurung; and Warhol’s Muses: The Artists, Misfits, and Superstars Destroyed by the Factory Fame Machine by Laurence Leamer.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Todd Purdum’s Desi Arnaz for the Los Angeles Times.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll wrote about some recent books in translation for Words Without Borders and about an uptick in literary projects about the Jersey Devil for Reactor.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Virginia Deluca’s If You Must Go, I Wish You Triplets for BookTrib.
Michael O’Donnell reviewed Zachary Taylor’s Ellmann’s Joyce for The American Scholar.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky; The First and Last King of Haiti: The Rise and Fall of Henry Christophe by Marlene L. Daut; and The Accidentals, written by Guadalupe Nettel and translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey for the California Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Maria Reva’s Endling for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Bill Thompson reviewed George Bradley’s Carpet Diem: Tales from the World of Oriental Rugs for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
David Starkey reviewed After Lives: On Biography and the Mysteries of the Human Heart by Megan Marshall for the California Review of Books.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed We, The Casertas, written by Aurora Venturini and translated from the Spanish by Kit Maude for Words Without Borders; Jess Walter’s So Far Gonefor The Boston Globe, and Taylor Jenkins Reid’s Atmospherefor The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Harris Lahti’s Foreclosure Gothic for The Brooklyn Rail.
Michael Bobelian wrote about John Roy Carlson’s Under Cover: My Four Years in the Nazi Underworld of Americafor the Los Angeles Review of Books.
George Yatchisin reviewed Marcy Dermansky’s Hot Air for the California Review of Books.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed the short story collection Other Emergencies by Sarah Freligh for Bending Genres.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Dengue Boy, written by Michel Nieva and translated from the Spanish by Rahul Berry, for Locus.
Member Interviews
Mandana Chaffa, NBCC’s Vice President of the Barrios Book in Translation Prize and Co-Vice President of Membership, interviewed Ocean Vuong about his novel The Emperor of Gladness for The Brooklyn Rail.
Eric Olson profiled Jess Walter for The Seattle Times.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll talked with Brian DeCubellis and Ethan Sacks, two of the creators behind the crime comic Dark Honor, for InsideHook.
Member News
Grace Schulman’s poem “Thebes, Revisited,” selected for a Pushcart Prize, will appear in the Pushcart Prize anthology coming this winter. Her poem “The Night Visitor” appears in the current Best American Poetry, and her poetic sequence “Alive and Well: Tomb Sculptures in the Staglieno Cemetery” was translated into Italian by Massimo Bacigalupo and published in Portia, a magazine in Genoa, Italy.
Mary Mackey’s ninth collection of poetry, In This Burning World: Poems of Love and Apocalypse, has just been published by Marsh Hawk Press. In these poems, she asks us not only to imagine what the world will be like as the Earth’s climate changes, but how we can preserve joy and compassion in times of catastrophe. Mackey has been interviewed on KDVS-FM in Davis, California, and KALW-FM in San Francisco, and online by the Women’s National Book Association, not only about In This Burning World, but also about the fact that she is donating all profits from sales to charities that help the homeless who are hit particularly hard by climate change.
The bilingual Spanish-English edition of diamond & rust, written by Catalina Vergara and translated by Tiffany Troy, is now available for pre-order. If you’re interested in a review copy of this chapbook set in Santiago, Chile, and inspired by themes of love and memory in Joan Baez’s eponymous song, you can request a review copy through this link or email TiffanyTroy.Poet@gmail.com with your mailing address.
“Linen Hall Library | The Main Library” by Tuomo Lindfors is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.