Members and friends, we wanted to thank all of you who attended or watched the National Book Critics Circle Awards ceremony last week! We were honored to shine a spotlight on some of the best books published in 2025, and we couldn’t have done it without your support. If you missed the ceremony, you can watch it here, and you can see the list of winners here. Take care, and as always, thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Joan Frank reviewed Colm Tóibín’s The News From Dublin for The Boston Globe.
McKenzie Watson-Fore reviewed Lauren W. Westerfield’s Woman House: Essays and Assemblages for The Rumpus.
For The Atlantic, Robert Rubsam reviewed Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things.
Catherine Parnell reviewed Madelaine Before the Dawn, written by Sandrine Collette and translated from the French by Alison Anderson for Compulsive Reader.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Nicholas Lemann’s Returning for The Wall Street Journal and Jacques Berlinerblau’s Can We Laugh at That? for the Forward.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Hot Chocolate on Thursday, written by Michiko Aoyama and translated from the Japanese by E. Madison Shimoda, The Astral Library by Kate Quinn, and Blade by Wendy Walker for BookTrib.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Being Thomas Jefferson by Andrew Burstein for the California Review of Books.
Joyce Saenz Harris reviewed Western Star: The Life and Legends of Larry McMurtry by David Streitfeld for The Dallas Morning News.
Nathaniel Popkin wrote about A Mask the Color of the Sky, written by Bassem Khandaqji and translated from the Arabic by Addie Leak, on his Substack, Two Feet on the Ground.
Paul Wilner wrote a spring and summer literary preview for Alta.
Tom Peebles reviewed Mark Lilla’s Ignorance and Bliss: On Wanting Not to Know on his personal blog.
David Starkey reviewed California Rewritten by John Freeman for the California Review of Books.
Diane Scharper reviewed Mark Oppenheimer’s Judy Blume: A Life for the Washington Examiner.
Member Interviews
Adam M. Lowenstein interviewed Karen Hao about Empire of AI: Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman’s OpenAI, winner of the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, for Drilled.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Walter Mosley for Publishers Weekly.
Morgan Leigh Davies interviewed Karan Mahajan and Vigdis Hjorth for Electric Lit.
Sullivan Summer interviewed poet Diamond Forde about her book The Book of Alice, winner of the 2025 Academy of American Poets James Laughlin Award, for the New Books Network.
Paul Wilner interviewed Peter Richardson about his new book, Brand New Beat: The Wild Rise of Rolling Stone Magazine, for the Nob Hill Gazette.
Member News
Frank Freeman’s poem “Horses and Mystical Terror” was published at The Opiate.
Jim Ruland’s new novel, Mightier Than the Sword, will be published by Rare Bird in the fall. Ruland’s follow-up to Make It Stop is about four English teachers who go on a crime spree.
On April 20 at 7:00 p.m. Eastern at P&T Knitwear in New York, NBCC member Susan Shapiro will moderate a panel, The Inside Scoop: How to Publish a Book With the Big 5 Publishers, featuring Johanna V. Castillo, Eamon Dolan, Deborah Garrison, Clarence A. Haynes, Emi Ikkanda, and Kevin Nguyen. Tickets are available here.
Deborah Copperud launched Read Minnesota Books, a podcast focused on Minnesota authors, in response to declining book coverage at major media organizations. Each short-form episode includes a brief book excerpt, an author interview, and local literary recommendations. Award-winning St. Paul author Kao Kalia Yang joined Copperud for the inaugural episode to talk about her picture book, The Blue House I Loved, and her recent essay about surviving Operation Metro Surge as a Hmong refugee. In subsequent episodes, Andrew Elfenbein, a University of Minnesota English professor, discussed why he pivoted from academic scholarship to write The Quyre, a queer fairy romantic fantasy novel, and prolific historical Christian romance author Tracie Peterson spoke about how her research about Minnesota’s first charity hospital informed her new book series, A Minnesota Legacy, from Minnesota-based publisher Bethany House. Listeners can subscribe at www.readminnesotabooks.com or wherever they listen to podcasts.