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
Heller McAlpin reviewed Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance for The Christian Science Monitor.
Charlotte E. Rosen reviewed Bench Ansfield’s Born in Flamesfor Protean Magazine.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed Sea, Mothers, Swallow, Tongues, written by Kim de L’Horizon and translated from the German by Jamie Lee Searle, for On the Seawall.
NBCC board member May-lee Chai reviewed Arundhati Roy’s new memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, for The Minnesota Star Tribune.
Valerie Duff-Strautmann reviewed Lisa Wells’ The Fire Passage for On the Seawall.
Meredith Maran reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the Riverfor The Washington Post.
Hannah Weber reviewed We Computers, written by Hamid Ismailov and translated from the Uzbek by Susan Fairweather-Vega, for Words Without Borders.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Elizabeth Evitts Dickinson’s Claire McCardell: The Designer Who Set Women Free and Spencer Quinn’s Mrs. Plansky Goes Rogue for BookTrib.
Tom Peebles reviewed Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ and the Capitalism of the Far Right on his personal blog.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Playing Wolf, written by Zuzana Říhová and translated from the Czech by Alex Zucker, for On the Seawall.
Clea Simon reviewed The Book of I by David Grieg and Clown Townby Mick Herron for The Arts Fuse.
Benjamin Woodard reviewed Absence by Issa Quincy and The Hairdresser’s Son, written by Gerbrand Bakker and translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, for On the Seawall.
Charles Green reviewed John F. Andrews’ Dogs Don’t Cry for Blueink Review.
Melissa Holbrook Pierson reviewed Katherine Larson’s Wedding of the Foxes for On the Seawall.
Randy Cepuch reviewed Jane Leavy’s Make Me Commissioner: I Know What’s Wrong With Baseball and How to Fix Itfor the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Daniel Pollack-Pelzner’s Lin-Manuel Miranda for the Los Angeles Times.
Nancy Naomi Carlson reviewed From Language to Language: The Hospitality of Translation, written by Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne and translated from the French by Dylan Temel, for On the Seawall.
Michael O’Donnell reviewed two books about fine carpets and their history for The Wall Street Journal.
Jim Schley reviewed William Homestead’s memoir Not Till We Are Lost: Thoreau, Education, and Climate Crisis for Seven Days.
Bill Thompson reviewed Marc Berman’s Nature and the Mind for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
Ruth Joffre reviewed Chilco, written by Daniela Catrileo and translated from the Spanish by Jacob Edelstein, for On the Seawall.
Nell Beram reviewed two books for Shelf Awareness: Cesar Romero: The Joker Is Wild by Samuel Garza Bernstein and The Gods of New York: Egotists, Idealists, Opportunists, and the Birth of the Modern City: 1986-1990 by Jonathan Mahler.
Michael Bobelian reviewed Jill Lepore’s We the People: A History of the U.S. Constitutionfor The Washington Post.
Robert Allen Papinchak reviewed Donna Leon’s Backstage: Stories of a Writing Life and Fannie Flagg’s Something to Look Forward Tofor Shelf Awareness.
John Skoyles reviewed Nathan Kernan’s A Day Like Any Other: The Life of James Schuyler and Ron Padgett’s Dick: A Memoir of Dick Gallup for Commonweal.
Member Interviews
Grant Faulkner interviewed Myriam Gurba about her memoir, Mean, and the forthcoming Poppy State on the Memoir Nation podcast.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari checked in with NBCC fiction award winner Joan Silber about writing about friendship and the meaning of mercy for her Literary Hub conversation series.
Sullivan Summer interviewed urban historian LaShawn Harris about her book, Tell Her Story: Eleanor Bumpurs & the Police Killing That Galvanized New York City, for the New Books Network.
Martha Anne Toll interviewed author and artist Deborah English for the Baltimore Fishbowl.
For the Duluth News Tribune, Jay Gabler interviewed Elle Andra-Warner, author of Edmund Fitzgerald: The Legendary Great Lakes Shipwreck.
NBCC board member Tobias Carroll interviewed Black-Owned author Char Adams for Publishers Weekly and author Johan Harstad and translator David M. Smith (The Red Handler) for Vol. 1 Brooklyn.
For the podcast A Meal of Thorns, Jake Casella Brookins talked to critic Zachary Gillan about Jeff VanderMeer’s Authority.
Member News
Jay Rogoff has been selected for the position of Poet Laureate of the city of Saratoga Springs, New York, for the years 2026 and 2027.
Jack Rockwell’s translation of Daniela Alcívar Bellolio’s “River Landscape” appeared last week in The Common.
The first chapter of former NBCC board member Rod Davis’ new novel, Life in the Time of Hurricanes, has been excerpted at the Texas Observer website as part of a remembrance of the 20-year anniversary of the devastation of hurricane Katrina, also in connection with a special event, The Lingering Storm, in Houston on Sept. 10, that was sponsored by the nonprofit news outlets Mother Jones, Capital B, the Observer, and the national racial justice organization Hip Hop Caucus.
Martha Anne Toll has an essay titled “America’s Future in Dead Pianos?” in the new America’s Future Anthology, edited by Caroline Bock and Jona Colson. Martha was interviewed by David Naimon about Duet for One, for the Between the Covers podcast.
“Bookstore” by Shelby H. is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.