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 and build a career as a freelance critic. Cost: $10 for non-members/free for NBCC members (fee can be applied to a new NBCC membership within two weeks of the event). Register here.
Member Reviews/Essays
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc wrote about the importance of criticism, John Updike, Robert Poilidori, and Hurricane Katrina for the Oxford American.
Parul Kapur reviewed Arundhati Roy’s memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, for Khabar.
Joan Frank reviewed Joan Silber’s Mercy for The Washington Post.
Sullivan Summer’s feature “A Tribute to Black Women Activists” was published in the Chicago Review of Books’ Read Your Resistance column.
Tamara MC’s essay “The Night Sinéad O’Connor Found Me in a Convertible” was published in Nuts and Bolts from Sonya.
Rhoda Feng reviewed Trip by Amie Barrodale for The Washington Post, Moderation by Elaine Castillo for The New York Times, and Exophony: Voyages Outside the Mother Tongue, written by Yoko Tawada and translated from the Japanese by Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda, for Foreign Policy.
NBCC member and John Leonard Prize reader Claude Peck reviewed Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Aiden Hunt reviewed King of Kings: The Iranian Revolution: A Story of Hubris, Delusion and Catastrophic Miscalculation by Scott Anderson for New Pages.
Charles Green reviewed David Medina’s Shakespeare’s Greatest Love for The Gay & Lesbian Review and John F. Andrews’ An American Nurse in Paris for Blueink Review.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Restoration, written by Ave Barrera and translated from the Spanish by Ellen Jones and Robin Myers, for Southwest Review, and Bedbugs, written by Martina Vidaić and translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Zoe B. Wallbrook’s History Lessons and Sarah Strohmeyer’s A Mother Always Knows for BookTrib.
Lee Rossi reviewed two new poetry anthologies, At the Corner of Hope and Despair: An Anthology for the Trump Era, edited by Charlotte Muse, Chris Cummings, and Patrick Daly, and Beautiful Little Fools: Poetry of Glamour, Obsession, and the Gilded Age, edited by Alan Parry and Karen Pierce Gonzalez, for Portside.org.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Greyhound by Joanna Pocock for The Washington Post and Kate Zambreno’s Animal Stories for The Brooklyn Rail.
Anne Charles reviewed Olivia Wolfgang-Smith’s Mutual Interestfor The Gay & Lesbian Review.
Genanne Walsh reviewed Nick Fuller Googins’ The Frequency of Living Things for the Portland Press Herald – Maine Sunday Telegram.
Dan Kubis reviewed Katharina Volckmer’s Calls May Be Recorded for The Brooklyn Rail.
Member Interviews
Rhoda Feng interviewed the late Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o before he died for The Nation.
NBCC’s Vice President/Barrios Prize and Co-Vice President/Membership interviewed Harryette Mullen about Regaining Unconsciousness for The Brooklyn Rail.
For the Duluth News Tribune, Jay Gabler interviewed Lee Hawkins, author of I Am Nobody’s Slave: How Uncovering My Family’s History Set Me Free.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Mitch Albom for Publishers Weekly.
Member News
Heather Treseler has received the 2025 Massachusetts Book Award in poetry for Auguries & Divinations. The Massachusetts Book Awards recognize the “best of the best” books published in 2024 in six genres with a ceremony at the Massachusetts State House.
“my old typewriter” by brett ohland is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.