Members and friends, we hope you’re enjoying the waning days of summer! Our critics have been busy this week with reviews by authors including Catherine Lacey, Michael Maslin, Eimear McBride, Claire Hoffman, and interviewing writers such as Elliot Ackerman, Emily St. James, Evie Shockley, and Emily Hunt Kivel. Take care, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Alana Pockros reviewed Catherine Lacey’s The Mobius Bookfor The Nation.
Dan Kubis reviewed Joanna Pocock’s Greyhound for the Chicago Review of Books.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Awards Iris Jamahl Dunkle reviewed Didi Jackson’s poetry collection My Infinity in her latest Substack, Finding Lost Voices.
Terese Svoboda reviewed Tom Ross’ Miss Abracadabra for The Common.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Michael Maslin’s Peter Arno: The Mad, Mad World of The New Yorker’s Greatest Cartoonist for the TLS, and Live Fast, written by Brigitte Giraud and translated from the French by Cory Stockwell, in the print edition of World Literature Today.
Krystal Languell reviewed LaTasha N. Nevada Diggs’ Village in the print edition of American Poetry Review.
Kurt Baumeister reviewed Giano Cromley’s American Mythology for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll wrote about the real-world comics history that informed John Pistelli’s Major Arcana for Zona Motel; reflected on the fiction of Joel Lane for Reactor, and wrote about food-centric reading series for Publishers Weekly.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Eimear McBride’s The City Changes Its Facefor The Boston Globe.
NBCC member and John Leonard Prize reader Claude Peck wrote about poet James Schuyler for Rain Taxi Review of Books on the occasion of the publication by FSG of A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler by Nathan Kernan. Included are links to never-released audio files of Schuyler reading two of his poems at Hotel Chelsea in 1986.
Ellen Prentiss Campbell wrote about her childhood love of Dare Wright’s Lonely Dolls books, and Jean Nathan’s The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll: The Search for Dare Wright, for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
For The Village Star-Revue, Michael Quinn reviewed The Bowery by David Mulkins.
George Yatchisin reviewed Claire Hoffman’s Sister, Sinner: The Miraculous, Scandalous Story of Aimee Semple McPherson for the California Review of Books.
Joyce Sáenz Harris wrote about the 40th-anniversary edition of Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dovefor The Dallas Morning News.
Bill Thompson reviewed Tim Queeney’s Rope for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
Nell Beram reviewed four books for Shelf Awareness: Bogart and Huston: Their Lives, Their Adventures, and the Classic Movies They Made Together by Nat Segaloff; A Ghostwriter’s Guide to Murder by Melinda Mullet; Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse by Thomas Chatterton Williams; and Tart: Misadventures of an Anonymous Chef by Slutty Cheff.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed Satellite: Essays of Fatherhood and Home, Near and Far by Simmons Buntin for Ecolit Books.
Marcie Geffner reviewed Susan Wiggs’s novel Wayward Girls for the Washington Independent Review of Books and contributed Dana Goldstein’s The Teacher Wars: A History of America’s Most Embattled Profession to WIRB‘s roundup of “32 Books They Should Assign in School (but Probably Won’t).”
Member Interviews
Celia McGee profiled Elliot Ackerman for The New York Times.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Woodworking author Emily St. James for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
Sullivan Summer interviewed two-time Hurston/Wright Legacy Award Winner Evie Shockley, editor of the latest Norton Library edition of Harriet Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for the New Books Network.
Kurt Baumeister interviewed Cynthia Weiner for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
For The Red Hook Star-Revue, Michael Quinn interviewed Brooklyn author Mike Fiorito about his latest book, UFO Symphonic.
NBCC Vice President/Online Michael Schaub interviewed Emily Hunt Kivel, Michael Koresky, and Jeff Weiss for The Orange County Register.
Member News
NBCC Co-Vice President/Awards Christoph Irmscher is the winner of Washington Monthly‘s 2025 Kukula Award for Excellence in Nonfiction Book Reviewing in the smaller publications category for his review of Stolen Pride: Loss, Shame, and the Rise of the Right by Arlie Russell Hochschild.
Terese Svoboda’s second memoir and 24th book, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, received a starred review from Publishers Weekly.
Kurt Baumeister was interviewed by Ben Tanzer for The National Book Review. Kurt’s novel Twilight of the Gods was reviewed by William Brandon III for F(r)iction magazine.
“More books than shelves” by Jeff Vincent is licensed under CC BY 2.0.