Members and friends, we hope you’re having a good summer! Our members have been busy with reviews of books by authors including Stephanie Wambugu, Åsne Seierstad, Ed Park, and Jennifer Dasal, and interviews with writers such as Arundhati Roy, Jeff Lemire, and Meg Waite Clayton. Take care, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Amy Yee wrote an op-ed about the Dalai Lama’s 90th birthday for the Chicago Sun-Times, and cited the Tibetan spiritual leader’s new book, Voice for the Voiceless.
Kitty Kelley reviewed Jennifer Dasal’s The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Parisfor the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Linda Norton wrote about the late Fanny Howe for her Substack, The Ruins.
Joan Silverman reviewed Maureen Stanton’s The Murmur of Everything Movingfor the Portland Press Herald.
NBCC board member May-lee Chai had an essay about trying to use Sinéad O’Connor’s music to reach out to her mother published in the new anthology, Nothing Compares to You: What Sinéad O’Connor Means to Us, edited by Sonya Huber and Martha Bayne, which was published on July 22 by Atria/One Signal Publishers. Her essay, “Blood on the Wall,” was also excerpted in Peter C. Baker’s music substack, Tracks on Tracks.
Charles Green reviewed Frank Pizzoli’s Passionate Outlier: Gay Writers and Allies on Their Work for the Washington Blade.
Former NBCC President Kate Tuttle reviewed Stephanie Wambugu’s Lonely Crowdsfor The Boston Globe.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Nilima Rao’s A Shipwreck in Fiji for BookTrib.
Julia M. Klein reviewed The Painter’s Fire by Zara Anahanslin for The Wall Street Journal; The Afghans, written by Åsne Seierstad and translated from the Norwegian by Seán Kinsella, for The Boston Globe; and The Man No One Believed by Joshua Sharpe for The Washington Post.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll wrote about a new biography of Curzio Malaparte for The Metropolitan Review; about Tess Chakkalakal’s A Matter of Complexion, a new biography of Charles W. Chesnutt, for the Portland Press Herald; and offered some thoughts on July books in translation for Words Without Borders.
Jake Casella Brookins reviewed Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis for the Chicago Review of Books.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Elly Griffiths’s The Frozen People for Shelf Awareness.
Julia Lichtblau reviewed Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel for The Common.
NBCC board member Iris Jamahl Dunkle wrote about the radical acts of Radclyffe Hall and her seminal book, The Well of Loneliness, in her latest Substack, Finding Lost Voices.
Jim Ruland reviewed Nolan Knight’s The Gorgon of Los Feliz for Alta.
Kristen Martin reviewed Barbara Demick’s Daughters of the Bamboo Grove and Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood for The Washington Post.
Anne Charles reviewed Black Panther Woman:The Political and Spiritual Life of Ericka Huggins by Mary Frances Phillips for The Gay & Lesbian Review Worldwide.
Diane Scharper reviewed Jennifer Dasal’s The Club: Where American Women Artists Found Refuge in Belle Époque Paris for the Washington Examiner.
Abby Manzella wrote an essay with an interview of Karen Babine’s The Allure of Elsewhere: A Memoir of Going Solo at CRAFT.
Karl Wolff reviewed The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran, written by Shida Bazyar and translated from the German by Ruth Martin, for The Driftless Area Review.
Member Interviews
Eric Olson profiled Ed Park for Literary Hub.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Arundhati Roy for Publishers Weekly.
NBCC Vice President/Barrios Prize and Co-Vice President/Membership Mandana Chaffa interviewed translator and author Hisham Matar and the visual artist Diana Matar about their collaboration on I Found Myself: The Last Dreams, written by the late Naguib Mahfouz, for Chicago Review of Books.
For the podcast A Meal of Thorns, Jake Casella Brookins interviewed one of the chairs of Readercon, a speculative literature convention, and also visited Lovestruck Books, a new romance-focused indie bookstore in Cambridge.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell interviewed Deborah Derrickson Kossman about her memoir Lost Found Kept for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Tiffany Troy interviewed Geovani Martins about his novel Via Ápia for Asymptote.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed writer and artist Jeff Lemire about his new memoir for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
NBCC Vice President/Online interviewed NBCC member Meg Waite Clayton about her novel Typewriter Beach and Paul Bradley Carr about his novel The Confessions for The Orange County Register.
Member News
NBCC board member Iris Jamahl Dunkle’s poem “Preamble to the West” appeared in The Atlantic.
Roxana Robinson gave an address on the evening preceding Medal Day at the MacDowell Colony.
Julia Lichtblau’s prose-poem “The Dictionary of Occupational Titles, 1939” has won second prize in the Wergle Flomp Humorous Poetry Contest, and her short story “Désolée, Monsieur” is forthcoming in Panorama‘s Paris issue.
Cassandra Whitaker released a collection of poetry from Jackleg Press, Wolf Devouring A Wolf Devouring A Wolf.
“Bookstore.” by MIKI Yoshihito is licensed under CC BY 2.0.