Members and friends, we hope you’re having a good summer! Our members have been hard at work reviewing books by authors including Amy Bloom, Mo Ogrodnik, Gary Shteyngart, Ron Chernow, and Jeffrey Seller. Read on for more reviews, interviews, and member news, and take care!
Member Reviews/Essays
Joan Frank reviewed Amy Bloom’s I’ll Be Right Here for The Washington Post.
NBCC board member May-lee Chai reviewed Gulf by Mo Ogrodnik for The New York Times Book Review.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Vera, or Faith by Gary Shteyngart for The Boston Globe; House of Fury, written by Evelio Rosero and translated from the Spanish by Victor Meadowcroft, for Southwest Review, and I Gave You Eyes and You Looked Toward Darkness, written by Irene Solà and translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem for Words Without Borders.
James Marcus reviewed Ron Chernow’s Mark Twain for the TLS.
Hope Reese wrote a roundup of five books about family estrangement for The New York Times.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Lucas Schaefer’s The Slipfor Arts Alive San Antonio and Writing Home: Selected World War II Letters of Leslie A. Fiedler for Rain Taxi.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Jeffrey Seller’s Theater Kid for BookTrib.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Jill Bialosky’s The End Is the Beginning for The Wall Street Journal.
Charles Green reviewed Bruce Vilanch’s It Seemed Like a Bad Idea at the Time: The Worst TV Shows in History and Other Things I Wrote for The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Lee Rossi reviewed Bruce Bond’s Vault for Pedestal Magazine.
Aiden Hunt reviewed Benjamin Nathans’ To the Success of Our Hopeless Causefor New Pages.
Jim Ruland reviewed Megan Abbott’s El Dorado Drive for the Los Angeles Times.
Robert Rubsam reviewed Donald Niedekker’s A Strange and Perfect Account From the Permafrost for The Washington Post.
Miriam O’Neal reviewed Thomas O’Grady’s Coming Ashore: New & Selected Poems for Nixes Mate Review.
Member Interviews
Jake Casella Brookins talked to author and historian Arkady Martine about C.J. Cherryh’s novel 40,000 in Gehenna for the podcast A Meal of Thorns.
Hope Reese interviewed Nicole Karlis about Your Brain on Altruism for Greater Good Magazine.
Member News
Hope Reese’s The Women Are Not Fine: The Dark History of a Poisonous Sisterhoodwill be published by Brazen Books, Hachette UK, on July 10.
The Ancillary Review of Books, where NBCC member Jake Casella Brookins is the publishing editor, is a finalist for the 2025 Ignyte Critics Award. Voting is open until August 15.
“The best days are not planned” by Marcus Hansson is licensed under CC BY 2.0.