Members and friends, we’re getting ready for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony, which is happening this week! 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
Catherine Parnell reviewed Tangerinn by Emanuela Anechoum, translated from the Italian by Lucy Rand, for Compulsive Reader and Surrender by Jennifer Acker for MicroLit.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Caitlin Rother’s Hooked for BookTrib.
Brian Tanguay reviewed The Coroner’s Silence by Terence Keel for the California Review of Books.
Bill Thompson reviewed Boston, 1776 by J.D. Dickey for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
Priscilla Gilman reviewed Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich for The Boston Globe.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Daniel Okrent’s Stephen Sondheim and Loubna Mrie’s Defiance for the Los Angeles Times, Ian Buruma’s Stay Alive for the Forward, and Dorothy Roberts’s The Mixed Marriage Project for The Pennsylvania Gazette.
Barbara J. King reviewed An Inconvenience of Penguins by Jamie Lafferty and The Penguin Book of Penguins, written by Peter Fretwell and illustrated by Lisa Fretwell, for the Times Literary Supplement.
Member Interviews
NBCC Vice President/Barrios Book in Translation Prize and Co-Vice President/Membership Mandana Chaffa interviewed poet Cortney Lamar Charleston about his new collection It’s Important I Remember for Chicago Review of Books.
Nell Beram interviewed Ryan T. Higgins, author and illustrator of the award-winning Mother Bruce picture-book series, for the Portland Press Herald.
For the Indirect Books podcast, Rebecca Ruth Gould spoke with D.W. White about her debut short story collection, Strangers.
Member News
Hélène Cardona read excerpts from her book La Vie Suspendue / Life in Suspension (Salmon Poetry) as well as from her translation of Dorianne Laux’s Ce que nous portons (Éditions du Cygne) during her participation in the 5th edition of the Quart d’heure de lecture national with the CNL – Centre national du livre and the Parlement des écrivaines francophones, an initiative of the French Ministry of Culture.