Friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been busy with reviews of books by authors including Margaret Atwood, Stephen Greenblatt, Matthew Pearl, and Mary Lucia, and interviews with writers such as Salman Rushdie, Shatema Threadcraft, and Elizabeth Bradfield. Take care, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Roxana Robinson reviewed Margaret Atwood’s Book of Livesfor The Washington Post.
Ellen Brown reviewed Todd Goddard’s Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Lifefor the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Former NBCC board member and recipient of the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing Steven G. Kellman reviewed Stephen Greenblatt’s Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare’s Greatest Rival for The American Scholar.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Ellen Huet’s Empire of Orgasm for the Los Angeles Times; Douglas Century’s Crash of the Heavens and Christine Kuehn’s Family of Spies for the Forward; Amanda Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure for The Wall Street Journal; and Matthew Pearl’s The Award for The Boston Globe.
Deborah Copperud reviewed Mary Lucia’s What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder To Relate To for Racket.
Kristen Martin reviewed Kristin Collier’s What Debt Demands for The Baffler and wrote a commentary piece about President Trump’s foster care executive order, drawing on her book The Sun Won’t Come Out Tomorrow, for The New Yorker.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Evelyn Skye’s The Incredible Kindness of Paper for BookTrib.
Richard Scott Larson reviewed Wes Jamison’s My Corpse Inside for The Cincinnati Review.
Oline H. Cogdill compiled a list of the best mystery novels of 2025 for the South Florida Sun Sentinel and reviewed Kate Belli’s The Gallery Assistant for Shelf Awareness.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Eye of the Monkey, written by Krisztina Tóth and translated from the Hungarian by Ottilie Mulzet, for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Meg Lemke wrote about six weird Western graphic novels published in 2025, and compiled a list of the best comics and graphic novels of the year, for Publishers Weekly.
Tom Peebles reviewed Secret Maps: Maps You Were Never Meant to See, From the Middle Ages to Today by Tom Harper, Nick Dykes, and Magdalena Peszko for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Marcie Geffner reviewed The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life by Aleks Krotoski for her Substack, Mostly Books.
Nell Beram reviewed three books for Shelf Awareness: Don’t Stop: Why We (Still) Love Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours by Alan Light; Other People’s Fun by Harriet Lane; and With Friends Like These by Alissa Lee.
Bill Thompson reviewed Philip Marsden’s Under a Metal Sky for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
Michael O’Donnell wrote about Robert Dowling’s Coyote: The Dramatic Lives of Sam Shepard for The Atlantic.
Charles Green reviewed Bill Boushka’s Do Ask, Do Tell: A Gay Conservative Lashes Back for Blueink Review.
Michael Gessner reviewed Of Hartford in Many Lights: Celebrating Hartford’s Buildings, edited by Dennis Barone and Deborah Ducoff-Barone, for the North American Review.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed Bloom Again by Marybeth Holleman for Ecolit Books.
Member Interviews
Eric Olson interviewed Salman Rushdie for The Seattle Times.
Anne Charles interviewed Jeremy C. Fox, the new managing editor of The Gay and Lesbian Review, for theVermont cable-access news/interview show All Things LGBTQ.
Sullivan Summer interviewed Vanderbilt professor of gender and sexuality studies Dr. Shatema Threadcraft about her latest book, The Labors of Resurrection, for the New Books Network.
Aiden Hunt interviewed editors Kwame Dawes and Chris Abani about the 10th annual New-Generation African Poets Chapbook box set from Akashic Books for Philly Poetry Chapbook Review.
Jessica Gigot interviewed Elizabeth Bradfield about her new book, SOFAR, for Poetry Northwest.
Member News
Terese Svoboda talked about her new memoir, Hitler and My Mother-in-Law, with Allison Tyra on the Infinite Women podcast.
Oline H. Cogdill was the Broward Public Library Foundation’s Impact Honoree for promoting reading through her reviews and moderating of panels at the 38th Annual Philanthropic Day in Fort Lauderdale.
“Old Typewriter” by Elroy Serrao is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.