Friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Claire Vaye Watkins, Louise Erdrich, Avigayl Sharp, and Cole Swensen, and interviews with writers such as Erika Krouse, Sigrid Nunez, Julie Buntin and Amitav Ghosh. Take care, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Brian Tanguay reviewed Breathing Is How Some People Stay Alive by Alison Gadsby for the California Review of Books.
Former NBCC President Tom Beer wrote about graphic novels in his column for a special Graphic Lit Issue of Kirkus Reviews.
Betsy Groban’s latest column in Publishers Weekly about reading with her four young grandchildren updates readers on Olympia, Ira, Harry, and Bhoomi. She also wrote an article for PW about a remarkable sixth-grade teacher and her Jane Austen book club.
NBCC Fundraising & Grants Co-Chair Tobias Carroll wrote about some June books in translation for Words Without Borders and about Blu-rays imprints pairing movies and books for Publishers Weekly. Tobias also reviewed Jedediah Barry’s Kill All Wizards for Reactor and Avigayl Sharp’s Offseason for On the Seawall.
Tamara MC wrote about space food for Offrange and about accidentally ending up with a Serbian textbook for How I Learned.
NBCC Secretary Lauren LeBlanc’s Boston Globe review of Claire Vaye Watkins’ Yellow Pinewas featured in Literary Hub’s 5 Book Reviews You Need to Read This Week.
David Starkey reviewed Python’s Kiss by Louise Erdrich for the California Review of Books.
Britta Stromeyer reviewed Best Literary Translations 2026, edited by Arthur Sze, for On The Seawall.
McKenzie Watson-Fore’s personal essay, “When He’s Gone,” about the music of Switchfoot and Jon Foreman, is featured in Backsliders magazine, a new online magazine for those who have left the church.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Cole Swensen’s Veer for The Providence Eye and recommended several recent, small press-published books in Necessary Fiction‘s 2026 Summer Reading roundup.
Ann Fabian reviewed This Vast Enterprise: A New History of Lewis & Clark by Craig Fehrman and Chasing Lewis’s Monkeyflower: The Amazing Afterlife of the Lewis & Clark Expedition’s Wild Plants by Elizabeth Adelman for The National Book Review.
Jonathan Marks wrote about Saul Bellow’s Ravelsteinfor The Bulwark and reviewed Nathan Perl-Rosenthal’s The Long Revolution: Creating a United States After 1776 for Fusion.
Charles Green reviewed Abigail Cutter’s What the Trees Remember for Blueink Review.
Samantha Neugebauer reviewed Helen Bain’s debut novel, The Daffodil Days, for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Deborah Copperud wrote a review of Gail Rosenblum and Kait Ziemer-Davis’ Sea Salt Eatery: Recipes to Enjoy Year-Round for Racket and recommended nine Minnesota books on her Substack.
JoeAnn Hart reviewed The Thinning by Inga Simpson for Ecolit Books.
Member Interviews
Betsy Groban interviewed Charity Herndon, the owner of a Jane Austen-themed bookstore in Bordentown, New Jersey, for Publishers Weekly.
Sullivan Summer interviewed history and performance scholar Dr. Cheryl Thompson about her latest book, Staging Blackface in Canada, for the Additions to the Archive podcast.
McKenzie Watson-Fore interviewed Erika Krouse, winner of the Joyce Carol Oates Prize, for Culture Club, an arts and culture newsletter from Boulder Reporting Lab.
Eric Olson profiled Sigrid Nunez for Literary Hub.
Ian MacAllen interviewed Julie Buntin for the Chicago Review of Books.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled young-adult author Manuia Heinrich and middle-grade graphic novelist Fernanda Frick H. for Publishers Weekly.
NBCC Online Chair Michael Schaub interviewed Gabrielle Korn and Amitav Ghosh for The Orange County Register.
Member News
Betsy Groban’s Pow for Pia, the second book in her early reader series about plucky little Pia, was published by Simon & Schuster/Simon Spotlight on June 23.
Edna Bonhomme’s latest book, Tending to Our Wounds, a diasporic memoir exploring how the cities she’s lived in, from birth to the present, have treated Black people, will be published by Haymarket Books on July 21, 2026. The book has been tipped by Ms. Magazine as one of the books to read in July 2026 and by Poets & Writers as a New and Noteworthy Book. If members want a review copy, please contact her publicist, Michelle Betters, at michelle@haymarketbooks.org. The seeds for her book were developed while writing her Substack, Mobile Fragments, which features short essays on art, science, and her life in Germany. Please like, follow, subscribe, and tell a friend!
Terese Svoboda’s 25th book, The Horse-Headed Forest, will be published by New Directions in 2027.
Brink, the non-profit independent publisher of hybrid writing edited by NBCC member Hannah Bonner, has some upcoming opportunities. There’s the Brink Prize for Hybrid Fiction, judged by Billy-Ray Belcourt; the winner receives $700 and publication in Brink. There’s also the Emerging Writer Fellowship in Hybrid Writing; the winner receives one-on-one mentoring during the fall and publication in Brink.
Danielle Hanson has a new poetry collection, The Night Is What It Eats (Codhill Press). It explores several interlacing themes: saints complaining about their Heaven, body parts disassembled and put to use in a surrealistic bending of reality, elegies to animals loved and unloved, magical realist poems and odes to nature and natural forces. It is the world we live in, but dismantled and reassembled. Parts of the whole are set free, like St. Lucia’s eyes, to see the world on their own. It can be ordered here.
Jay Jennings’ book Carry the Rock: Race, Football, and the Soul of an American City (2010; revised and reissued by the University of Arkansas Press in 2023) is now available as an audiobook, narrated by Henry Leyva and produced by University Press Audiobooks.
Kai Maristed’s McIlvoy Book Prize-winning new title, The Age of Migration, will be out on July 21, with a Zoom launch on July 23. Readers can register here.