Members and friends, we hope you’re having a good summer! Last week, we hosted an event in which three of the most accomplished poetry critics today, Stephanie Burt, Anahid Nersessian, and David Orr, discussed being a poetry critic, the state of poetry criticism, and the pleasures and practicalities of becoming such a critic now. NBCC President Adam Dalva introduced the panel, and NBCC board members Rebecca Morgan Frank and David Woo served as moderators. A video of the event is now available on YouTube—we hope you’ll check it out!
Member Reviews/Essays
Farooz Rather wrote about exile, tradition, and family and how he remembers his home in Kashmir through the beloved voices of Faiz and Hisham Matar for The Margins.
Former NBCC President Heather Scott Partington reviewed Joyce Carol Oates’ Fox for the Los Angeles Times and Rebecca Solnit’s No Straight Road Takes You There for Alta. Her essay “Through the Lens of Solastalgia” was featured at Alta‘s California Book Club.
Joan Frank reviewed Kathy Wang’s Satisfaction Café for The Boston Globe.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll reviewed Jason Brown’s Outermark for the Portland Press Herald and contributed several entries to an InsideHook list of books that every man should read.
Alex Gurtis reviewed Molly Peacock’s The Widow’s Canyon Box for Rain Taxi.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Selene Shade, Resurrectionist for Hire by Victoria Dalpe for The Providence Eye and The Jamaica Kollection of the Shante Dream Arkive by Marcia Douglas for Necessary Fiction.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed Tash Aw’s The South for The Common.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Uzma Jalaluddin’s Detective Aunty and Sarina Bowen’s Dying to Meet You for BookTrib.
Kevin Anthony Brown wrote about Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fictionfor the New English Review.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Isaac Fellman’s Notes from a Regicide for Locus.
Richard Scott Larson reviewed Catherine Lacey’s The Möbius Book for the Chicago Review of Books.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed Novel Ecologies: Nature Remade and the Illusions of Tech by Allison Carruth for Ecolit Books.
Tom Peebles wrote about Deborah E. Lipstadt’s Golda Meir: Israel’s Matriarch on his personal blog.
Nell Beram reviewed four books for Shelf Awareness: Fifty Fifty by Steve Cavanagh; My Father Always Finds Corpses by Lee Hollis; Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness by Michael Koresky; and That’s How They Get You: An Unruly Anthology of Black American Humor, edited by Damon Young.
Former NBCC board member and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing recipient Steven G. Kellman reviewed James Shapiro’s The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook for The Washington Post.
Paul Wilner wrote a summer reading roundup, including offerings from Peter Orner, Ada Limón, Jonathan Lethem, Charlie Ann Anders, and Elaine Castillo, among others, for Alta.
Clea Simon reviewed E. Jean Carroll’s Not My Type for The Arts Fuse.
NBCC Vice President/Online Michael Schaub wrote a roundup of 33 new or forthcoming books from independent presses for The Orange County Register.
Member Interviews
For The New York Times, Celia McGee profiled Ivy Pochoda and her new novel, Ecstasy.
Former NBCC board member Anita Felicelli interviewed Caro De Robertis and Amy Tan for Alta.
Farooz Rather interviewed Aria Aber about her novel Good Girl for Public Books. They discussed how the novel derives complexity and strength from how the author, beneath the surface of the narration, keeps scissoring Nilab’s indulging in drugs and chasing after sexual desire with what her history entails: a mundane, exilic existence marked by the memory of brazen anti-immigrant violence.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Iain Pears for Publishers Weekly and Jeanne Thornton for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Grant Faulkner interviewed Jennifer Croft about her memoir, Homesick, which is accompanied by her own Polaroids, for Memoir Nation. Among other things, they talked about the many considerations of combining image and text—from your reader, to style, to the interplay between words and image, and Jennifer offered thoughtful insights around this and more.
“typewriter” by Cody Geary is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.