Friends, we hope you’re having a good summer! Our members have been hard at work with reviews by authors including Katie Yee, Dave Barry, Hannah Pittard, James Shapiro, and more, and interviews with Meg Waite Clayton, Mai Der Vang, Ruben Quesada, and Gary Shteyngart. Thanks for reading, and take care!
Member Reviews/Essays
Catherine Parnell reviewed The Brittle Age, written by Donatella Di Pietrantonio and translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, for Compulsive Reader.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Katie Yee’s Maggie; or, A Man and a Woman Walk Into a Bar for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Dave Barry’s Class Clown for BookTrib.
Marcie Geffner reviewed If You Love It, Let It Kill You by Hannah Pittard for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Sean Carlson reviewed Oona Frawley’s essay collection This Interim Time for The Common‘s monthly “What We’re Reading” series, and wrote an essay about music, memory, and aging anchored around the late-’70s punk band The Undertones for The Missouri Review.
Jay Jennings reviewed James McWilliams’s The Life and Poetry of Frank Stanfordfor the Arkansas Times.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Michael M. Grynbaum’s Empire of the Elite for the Forward.
Samantha Neugebauer wrote an essay about her writing fellowship experience at Hawthornden Castle for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member and Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing recipient Steven G. Kellman reviewed Susan Gubar’s Grand Finales: The Creative Longevity of Women Artists for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Kristen Martin reviewed Joseph Lee’s Nothing More of This Land for The Washington Post.
Tom Peebles reviewed James Shapiro’s The Playbook: A Story of Theatre, Democracy and the Making of a Culture War on his personal blog.
Member Interviews
Tiffany Troy interviewed Mai Der Vang about Primordial for Rain Taxi, former NBCC board member Ruben Quesada about Brutal Companion for American Poetry Review, and Mary Jo Bang about about the act of “carrying” poetry across from one language to another, the nuts and bolts of her translation process, and how Heaven is different for each person lucky enough to have made it there in Dante’s Paradiso for Asymptote.
For her Literary Hub conversations, NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari checked in with Gary Shteyngart on how he channels a precocious 10-year-old in his new novel, Vera, or Faith, and with NBCC member Meg Waite Clayton on fictionalizing Hollywood’s blacklist era in Typewriter Beach.
Member News
Hélène Cardona edited the SYNESTHESIA issue of The Creative Process, whichfeatures work by writers and artists from over 30 countries, including NBCC member George Yatchisin, Andrea Cohen, Cyrus Cassells, Allison Adelle Hedge Coke, and Ethelbert Miller. NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari’s short story “Brooklyn After the Fall” (and photographs from her #BridgestoBrooklyn series and an excerpt from Fire, Smoke, Wind, her novel in progress) were published in the issue. You can read Hélène’s introduction to the issue here.
Carole Burns has been acting as lead fiction judge for the 2025 Wales Book of the Year Award. Shortlists were announced in May; Clear by Carys Davies was announced as the overall winner at the awards ceremony last Thursday in Cardiff.
Samantha Neugebauer was interviewed by Washington Unbound for her Short Story Boudoir project.
“Stadtbibliothek IV, Stuttgart, 20230225” by Gilbert Sopakuwa is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.