Friends, we hope you’re having a good summer! Our members have been busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Maggie Nelson, Megan Abbott, Linn Ullmann, and Craig Finn, and interviews with writers such as Issa Quincy and Kiran Desai. Thanks for reading, and take care!
Member Reviews/Essays
Britta Stromeyer reviewed the anthology Tsunami: Women’s Voices from Mexico, edited by Gabriela Jauregui and Heather Cleary, for Tupelo Quarterly.
Meg Waite Clayton’s essay “Famous Writers and Their Typewriters” appeared in Writer’s Digest.
Erik Gleibermann has an excerpt from his memoir-in-progress, Jewfro American, in the North American Review.
Former NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner reviewed Maggie Nelson’s Pathemata for The Sewanee Review blog and Maya Deren’s Rituals in Transfigured Time and Kira Muratova’s The Asthenic Syndrome for The Machine That Kills Bad People at the ICA in London.
Nell Beram reviewed three books for Shelf Awareness: El Dorado Drive by Megan Abbott; The Game Is Afoot by Elise Bryant; and What the Night Brings by Mark Billingham.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Girl, 1983, written by Linn Ullmann and translated from the Norwegian by Martin Aitken, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed The Brittle Age, written by Donatella Di Pietrantonio and translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein, for Arts Alive San Antonio.
Carol Iaciofano Aucoin reviewed Sarah MacLean’s These Summer Storms and Megan Miranda’s You Belong Here for WBUR’s Arts & Culture.
Chris Barsanti reviewed David Barron’s The Martians for PopMatters.
NBCC board member Rebecca Morgan Frank highlighted seven summer poetry books in her Literary Hub poetry column.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Adriana Trigiani’s The View From Lake Como and Rachel Joyce’s The Homemade God.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Michelle Young’s The Art Spy for BookTrib.
Robert Rubsam reviewed Sebastian Castillo’s Fresh, Green Life for The Washington Post and Craig Finn’s Lousy With Ghosts for Defector.
Member Interviews
Former NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner interviewed Issa Quincy about his debut novel, Absence, for BOMB.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll talked with Flight editor Kazu Kabuishi about the anthology being reissued and with Andy Shallal about his new memoir for Publishers Weekly.
Tiffany Troy interviewed Esther Lin for Rain Taxi.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Kiran Desai for Publishers Weekly.
Member News
Hollay Ghadery’s collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies (Gordon Hill Press, 2025), is a finalist for the Toronto Book Awards.
Roberto Carlos Garcia’s essay collection, Traveling Freely, was reviewed by Luis Guzmán Valerio at World Literature Today.
Nancy Naomi Carlson, in celebration of Women in Translation month and sponsored by PEN America and the PEN Translation Committee, has co-organized a series of three translator/author Zoom events, as follows: August 7 (2:00 pm ET), August 14 (8:00 pm ET), and August 21 (2:00 pm ET). Close to 50 proposals were received and selections were made with an eye toward diversity of language, geographical area, new versus emerging translators, and genre, among other factors.
“Bookstore” by Natalia Romay is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.