Members and friends, we hope you’re having a good August! This past week, our members have been busy with reviews of books by authors including Téa Obreht, Claudia Rankine, Miriam Pawel, and Richard Russo, and interviews with writers such as Jennifer Putzi, Daniel Poppick, and Jasper Fforde. Take care, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Andrew Holter wrote an essay about the new reissue of Shiva Naipaul’s book about Jonestown, Journey to Nowhere, for The Paris Review Daily, and an essay about the Southern radical and historian Broadus Mitchell for the Oxford American.
Barbara J. King reviewed Richard Schweid’s Life on the Octopus Farm for Science magazine.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Karen Odden’s The Artful Dodge for BookTrib.
NBCC Secretary Lauren LeBlanc reviewed Téa Obreht’s Sunrisefor Alta; Literary Hub selected the piece as one of the five reviews you should read this week.
Briallen Hopper reviewed The Frenchmen: Or, My Life in Theory by Emily Eakin for The New Republic.
Bill Thompson reviewed Eric Moskowitz’s The Hardest, Longest Race for the Charleston (S.C.) Post and Courier.
Sullivan Summer reviewed Claudia Rankine’s Triage for the Washington Independent Review of Books.
Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr. reviewed Nicole Gonzalez Van Cleve’s Crime Fictions: How Racist Lies Built a System of Mass Wrongful Conviction in his Substack newsletter.
For Tupelo Quarterly, Tiffany Troy presents an essay and interview with Sylvia Thomas by Kristine Esser Slentz; a review of Jesse Millner’s Gina by K.B. Canaday; and interviews with Adam O. Davis, Aiden Heung, Joshua Bennett, Kristine Esser Slentz, Mandy Moe Pwint Tu, Mina Khan, Rebecca Gayle Howell, Rhoni Blankenhorn, Tina Chang, and Wayne Koestenbaum.
Brian Tanguay reviewed Wither by Dan Warner and California Dreams by Miriam Pawel for the California Review of Books.
Charles Green reviewed Lori B. Duff’s Devil’s Name for Blueink Review.
Priscilla Gilman reviewed Under The Falls by Richard Russo for The Boston Globe.
For Rain Taxi Review of Books, NBCC member and John Leonard Prize judge Claude Peck wrote about works by Édouard Louis, including two newly published books, Monique Escapes and Collapse, and older books, including The End of Eddy, Change, and A Woman’s Battles and Transformations. All books are translated into English from the French.
Krista Timeus wrote an essay, “Resisting Perfection,” about the experience of using an AI-proofreading tool as a bilingual speaker for AGNI‘s newly renamed blog Reverb.
George Yatchisin reviewed Amy Rigby’s Girl to Country: A Memoir for the California Review of Books.
Diane Scharper reviewed The Amateur by Chris Bohjalian for the Washington Examiner.
Member Interviews
For their Book Cougars podcast, NBCC member Chris Wolak and Emily Fine spoke with Jennifer Putzi about her new book, The Reconstruction Diary of Frances Anne Rollin: A Critical Edition, out now from UNC Press. Putzi is also co-director of the Black Women’s Diaries Project, a digital humanities initiative with a public website that will launch this November.
Diana Heald interviewed Daniel Poppick about his novel The Copywriter for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
For Asymptote, Tiffany Troy interviewed Chen Du and Xisheng Chen on translating Rock Arrangement by Yan An, and Kyle Shernuk and Darryl Sterk on translating Syaman Rapongan.
Elaine Szewczyk profiled Jasper Fforde for Publishers Weekly.
Member News
The audiobook of Daphne Kalotay’s “spellbinding” (Booklist) novel Blue Hours will be released this fall—performed by AudioFile “Golden Voice” narrator Julia Whelan. If you review audiobooks and would like an ALC, please send a request to daphnekalotay@gmail.com.
Lori O’Dea will make her fiction debut on Aug. 18 with Little Cavendish, a literary novella published by Rebel Satori Press.
“Le rayon jeunesse” by Julia Buchner is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.