Save the date! On Tuesday, Sept. 30, at 4 p.m. Pacific/7 p.m. Eastern, please join us on Zoom for “Criticism 101: Book Review Fundamentals,” led by Heather Scott Partington, former NBCC president and current treasurer and fiction chair. Whether criticism is your vocation, your side hustle, or your barbaric yawp, Heather will teach you how to get started, how to build a career, and how to shut down the voice in your head that says you don’t have authority. Cost: $10 for non-members/free for NBCC members (fee can be applied to a new NBCC membership within two weeks of the event). Registration link coming soon.
Member Reviews/Essays
Robert Rubsam reviewed Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional for Commonweal.
Oline Cogdill reviewed Saltbones by Jennifer Givhan and The Witch’s Orchard by Archer Sullivan for the South Florida Sun Sentinel.
Beth McDermott reviewed Cravings by Garnett Kilberg Cohen for the American Book Review.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Gaza: The Story of a Genocide, edited by Fatima Bhutto and Sonia Faleiro, for the California Review of Books.
Heller McAlpin reviewed two powerful memoirs for The Wall Street Journal: Arundhati Roy’s Mother Mary Comes to Me and Miriam Toews’ A Truce That Is Not Peace.
Marcie Geffner’s essay “Persecution or Paranoia?: The Mysterious Case of the Missing Cheese Blintzes” was published by The Jewish Writing Project.
Catherine Parnell reviewed Closer by Miriam Gershow for MicroLit and The Voices of Adriana, written by Elvira Navarro and translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney for World Literature Today.
Lanie Tankard reviewed Happy New Years by Maya Arad for World Literature Today.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Eternity by David Plante and A Living: Working-Class Americans Talk to Their Doctor by Dr. Michael Stein for The Providence Eye.
Charles Green reviewed Ed Shiffman’s Fraud, Murder and Mayhem for Blueink Review.
Erik Gleibermann wrote the essay “To Resist a Dictatorship of the Absurd, An American Turns to Václav Havel” for World Literature Today.
David Starkey reviewed Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks for the California Review of Books.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Michael Koresky’s Sick and Dirty: Hollywood’s Gay Golden Age and the Making of Modern Queerness for The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Cory Oldweiler wrote about Paradise Garden, written by Elena Fischer and translated from the German by Alexandra Roesch, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Member Interviews
Former NBCC President Tom Beer interviewed Julian Brave NoiseCat about his forthcoming memoir, We Survived the Night, for the Kirkus Reviews Fall Preview.
Sullivan Summer interviewed Alabama Poet Laureate Ashley M. Jones about her latest collection, Lullaby for the Grieving, for the New Books Network.
Sasha Vasilyuk spoke with Maria Reva about her novel, Endling, for BOMB.
For her Literary Hub conversation series, NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari interviewed Elaine Hsieh Chou, author of the surreal short story collection Where Are You Really From.
Richard Scott Larson corresponded with Chris Campanioni about their recent memoirs, The Long Hallway and north by north/west, for true magazine.
Member News
Roberto Carlos Garcia will be in conversation with Cheryl Boyce Taylor at the Center for Fiction in Brooklyn on Sept. 6 as part of the 2025 Brooklyn Caribbean Literary Festival.
Diane Josefowicz’s Guardians & Saints: Stories will be published in October by Cornerstone Press.
Kurt Baumeister’s Twilight of the Godswas reviewed by Jesi Bender in the print edition of Rain Taxi.
Leah Huete de Maines was featured in Poets & Writers magazine’s Small Press Points section.
“A basement of books” by Jim Nix is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.