Members and friends, we’re getting ready for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony, which is happening later this month! We’ll be hosting our annual finalists reading on March 25 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern and our awards ceremony on March 26 at 6:30 p.m. Eastern. Both events will be held at the New School Auditorium in New York, and we’d love to see you there! We’ll also be livestreaming the reading and the ceremony on our YouTube channel. If you’ll be in New York, we’d love to see you—please register here. In the meantime, we hope you’ll check out the finalists for the awards—you’re bound to find something you love. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Edna Bonhomme wrote about Namwali Serpell’s On Morrison for The New Republic.
Former NBCC Emerging Critic Tomi Onabanjo wrote about The Passenger Seat by Vijay Khurana and What We Can Know by Ian McEwan for the Tournament of Books.
NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Lauren LeBlanc reviewed Hannah Lillith Assadi’s Paradiso 17for Alta.
Former NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Hannah Bonner wrote about Deborah Stratman’s film Last Things for Another Gaze.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed Sometimes an Island by Ellen Meropol for Ecolit Books.
Marcie Geffner reviewed A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing, a debut novel by Alice Evelyn Yang, for the Washington Independent Review of Books. For her Substack, Mostly Books, Marcie reviewed the reissue of The Dancing Face, a thriller by Mike Phillips; and El Paso: Five Families and One Hundred Years of Blood, Migration, Race, and Memory, the debut nonfiction book by Jazmine Ulloa; and wrote a roundup, “7 Books I Read in February.”
Cynthia-Marie Marmo O’Brien reviewed My Oceans by Christina Rivera for America.
Emily Hall reviewed Kim Fu’s The Valley of Vengeful Ghosts for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Clea Simon reviewed Francis Spufford’s Nonesuch for The Arts Fuse.
David Starkey reviewed Orlando: A Graphic Novel, Susanne Kuhlendahl’s adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s book, for the California Review of Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Rachel Hawkins’ The Storm and Louise Fein’s Book of Forgotten Words for BookTrib.
George Yatchisin reviewed Paul Willis’ Orvieto for the Santa Barbara Independent.
For The Village Star-Revue, Michael Quinn wrote about Ed Schmidt’s one-man play, Edward, playing to sold-out audiences in New York City bookstores.
Yana Kane wrote about translating the works of Ukrainian poet Dmitry Blizniuk during the Russo-Ukrainian war for World Literature Today.
Michele Sharpe reviewed Elizabeth Bradfield’s poetry collection SOFAR for the Colorado Review.
Cory Oldweiler wrote about Artem Chapeye’s The Weathering, translated from the Ukrainian by Daisy Gibbons, for Words Without Borders and Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow, translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio, for The Boston Globe.
Member Interviews
Sullivan Summer interviewed poet Darius Phelps about his new collection, My God’s Been Silent, for the New Books Network.
Martha Anne Toll interviewed Olufemi Terry for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
In NBCC Co-Vice President/Events Jane Ciabattari’s Literary Hub conversation about All The World Can Hold, a post-9/11 cruise novel based on her own experience, Jung Yun notes, “The beauty of fiction is that I could turn this vague feeling into a pressure point for the characters and heighten the sense of containment that one already feels when they’re stuck on a ship.”
Zachary Fletcher interviewed Evelyn Iritani about her new book Safe Passage, a history of civilian exchanges between Japan and the US during World War II, for The Seattle Times.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Andrey Kurkov for Publishers Weekly.
For their Book Cougars podcast, NBCC member Chris Wolak and Emily Fine spoke with Tiya Miles about her biography Night Flyer: Harriet Tubman and the Faith Dreams of a Free People.
Celia McGee interviewed Amanda Vaill about Vaill’s Pride and Pleasure: The Schuyler Sisters in an Age of Revolution in the Trinity Talks series at St. Paul’s Chapel, Trinity Wall Street.
NBCC Vice President/Online Michael Schaub interviewed Char Adams for The Orange County Register.
Member News
Sonja Srinivasan interviewed NBCC member Yana Kane for the inaugural episode of the World Literature Today podcast. A translation and an original poem by Yana were published in Chaski Review.
Nicole Yurcaba’s poetry chapbook Hutsulka was a 2025 Silent River Poetry Prize finalist with River Paw Press; Hutsulka is now available for preorder at the River Paw Press website.
“Shirley Library” by Solihull Heritage & Local Studies is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.