Friends, we’ll be announcing the longlists for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle today through Thursday! To be the first to know who this year’s nominees are, be sure to follow us on Bluesky and Instagram. We can’t wait to share these incredible books with you!
Member Reviews/Essays
Rebecca Ruth Gould reviewed Peter Oborne’s Complicit: Britain’s Role in the Destruction of Gazafor The New Arab.
NBCC Vice President/Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Marie Myung-Ok Lee wrote about the death of the NEA Creative Writing Fellowship program for Brown Alumni Magazine.
Otosirieze wrote about Wole Soyinka for Open Country Mag.
Allan Graubard reviewed Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive?for Leonardo.
Hannah Weber reviewed Ugliness, written by Moshtari Hilal and translated from the German by Elisabeth Lauffer, for Full Stop, and Galápagos, written by Fátima Vélez and translated from the Spanish by Hannah Kauders, for Kismet.
Deborah Copperud rounded up seven books from Minnesota authors and publishers for Racket, a compilation that included The Scenic Route by Arnold R. Alanen; People the Planet Needs Now by Dudley Edmondson; Held: Essays in Belonging by Kathryn Nuernberger; Redman’s Muddy Waters Too by Reggie Noble and Ben Katzner; Terry Dactyl by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore; Like Family by Erin O. White; and Enter by Jim Moore.
Costa Beavin Pappas wrote about Indian modernist artist M.F. Husain for Artsy.
Marcie Geffner published “5 Books I Read in November 2025” and a review of The Nazis Next Door: How America Became a Safe Haven for Hitler’s Men by Eric Lichtblau in her Substack, Mostly Books.
Meg Lemke compiled Publishers Weekly’s annual graphic novels critic poll.
Jean Gazis reviewed The Great Global Transformation: The United States, China, and the Remaking of the World Economic Order by Branko Milanovic for PracticalEcommerce.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Mona’s Eyes, written by Thomas Schlesser and translated from the French by Hildegarde Serle; One of Themby Kitty Zeldis; and The Secret Christmas Library by Jenny Colgan for BookTrib.
Mary Maxwell reviewed What Remains: Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt for Revel.
For The American Prospect, Adam M. Lowenstein reviewed Jacob Silverman’s Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley and David Z. Morris’s Stealing the Future: Sam Bankman-Fried, Elite Fraud, and the Cult of Techno-Utopia.
Member Interviews
Costa Beavin Pappas interviewed Jonathan Haidt and Catherine Price about their book, The Amazing Generations, for Publishers Weekly.
Sullivan Summer interviewed Emmy Award-winning writer, playwright, and constitutional law professor Gloria J. Browne-Marshall about her latest book, A Protest History of the United States, for the New Books Network.
Member News
A 30th anniversary edition of Marion Winik’s memoir First Comes Love with a new introduction was released in audio on December 9; the print edition with the new introduction will follow in about two weeks. Marion took readers behind the scenes of the audiobook at the Baltimore Fishbowl, and wrote about the book at Literary HubandPeople, and wrote about memoirs of widowhood at Publishers Weekly.
Hope Reese was interviewed about her book The Women Are Not Fineby the Hungarian newspaper BAMA.
Bill Marx, president of the nonprofit organization Viva la Book Review, an innovative group dedicated to expanding and promoting book reviews in local media, will host the first session in a new free seminar series. The seminars, open to anyone interested in book reviewing, will explore topics such as how to balance barbs and bouquets in a critique, selecting books to review, survival strategies for critics, and more. You can learn more, vote on the first seminar’s topic, and receive notification when it goes live by signing up here.
Hannah Weber’s hybrid prose and photography piece, “Thresholds,” was published in Ambient Receiver.
Dean Rader recently participated in two different conversations as part of the Cy Twombly Foundation’s In Perspective series. The first, “Literature Turned to a Painting,” with poet and critic Cole Swensen, explores the relationship between Twombly and poetry. The second, “Imagining Soundscapes: From Rome to San Francisco and Back,” with Twombly Foundation director Eleonora Di Erasmo, focuses on Twombly’s series of paintings that quote Wallace Stevens’ “The Poems of Our Climate.”
Nancy Naomi Carlson’s translation “Call of Air” by French-Senegalese writer Sylvie Kandé was published on December 4, 2025, by the New York Review of Books. It is excerpted from Gestuary, forthcoming from Seagull Books in March 2026.
“Amersfoort Library interior” by Simon Sutcliffe is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.