Members and friends, we hope you’re doing well! Our members have been busy this past week with reviews of books by authors including Jorie Graham, Vlady Kociancich, Elliot Williams, Alessandra Ranelli, Justine van der Leun, Deborah Levy, Sigrid Nunez, and Rachel Aviv, and interviews with writers Jon Meacham, D.S. Waldman, Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim, and Dr. Elizabeth West. Take care, stay cool, and thanks for reading!
Member Reviews/Essays
Jeffrey Levine reviewed Jorie Graham’s Killing Spree for On the Seawall.
Katherine Arnoldi reviewed Ron Najor’s film Adjunctand Kate Beaton’s graphic memoir Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sandsfor the Journal of Working Class Studies.
Ron Slate reviewed Dorothea Tanning: A Surrealist World by Alyce Mahon; Diaries, written by Josef Koudelka, selected by Tomáš Pospěch, and translated from the Czech by Derek and Marzia Paton; The War That Made the Middle East: World War I and the End of the Ottoman Empire by Mustafa Aksakal; and Hyperpolitics by Anton Jäger for On the Seawall.
NBCC board member Rebecca Morgan Frank covered seven July poetry collections for Literary Hub. (In case you missed it: NBCC board member Craig Morgan Teicher has joined her as co-columnist for the monthly poetry column, and you can visit his roundup of June poetry here.)
For On the Seawall, Cory Oldweiler reviewed The Eighth Wonder, written by Vlady Kociancich and translated from the Spanish by Jessica Sequeira.
Kristen Martin reviewed Zayd Ayers Dohrn’s Dangerous, Dirty, Violent, and Young for The New Republic.
Renée K. Nicholson reviewed Chelsea Krieg’s Everything Is Water for Synapsis: A Journal of Health Humanities and Alex Boyd’s Take This for the Pain: Essays on Writing and Life for Hippocampus Magazine.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Elliot Williams’ Five Bullets for The Pennsylvania Gazette.
Jeanne Bonner reviewed When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing, a nonfiction book about Anne Frank written by Lola Lafon and translated from the French by Lauren Elkin, for World Literature Today. She was inspired to pitch the review because of her 2025 translation, This Darkness Will Never End, which was the first English translation of a book by Edith Bruck, a Hungarian-born Italian author who was initially compared to Anne Frank because both were deported by the Nazis when they were young girls.
Douglas C. MacLeod, Jr. reviewed Can We Laugh At That? by Jacques Berlinerblau for On the Seawall and Why Populists Are Winning: And How to Beat Them by Liam Byrne for Quadrant.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Alessandra Ranelli’s Murder at the Hotel Orient for BookTrib.
Hope Reese wrote about Justine van der Leun’s Unreasonable Womenfor Greater Good Magazine.
Serena Agusto-Cox reviewed Time and Other Solvents: A Story of Healing by Claudia Gary for Washington Unbound, and Maggie Smith’s A Suit or a Suitcase and Matt Haig’s The Midnight Trainfor her Substack.
Former NBCC Emerging Critics Fellow Maisie Wiltshire-Gordon wrote about Garth Greenwell’s Small Rain for the Cleveland Review of Books.
Benjamin Woodard reviewed Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris With Gertrude Stein for On the Seawall.
NBCC lifetime member Heller McAlpin reviewed Daniel Mason’s Country People for The Christian Science Monitor.
Alisyn Amant reviewed The Dog’s Gaze: A Visual History by Thomas Laquer for Hyperallergic.
Priscilla Gilman reviewed It Will Come Back To You by Sigrid Nunez for The Boston Globe.
Julia M. Klein reviewed Rachel Aviv’s You Won’t Get Free of It for the Los Angeles Times.
Chuck Augello reviewed Kurt Vonnegut in the USSR by Sarah D. Phillips for World Literature Today.
Member Interviews
NBCC board member Mary Ann Gwinn interviewed historian Jon Meacham, author of American Struggle: Democracy, Dissent and the Pursuit of a More Perfect Union, for Kirkus Reviews.
Heidi Seaborn interviewed poet D.S. Waldman, author of Atria, for The Adroit Journal.
Sullivan Summer interviewed historians Dr. Muhammad Fraser-Rahim and Dr. Elizabeth West about their book Gullah-Geechee Diasporas: Knowledge, Culture, and Black Lowcountry Legacies for the Additions to the Archive podcast.
Member News
NBCC lifetime member Parul Kapur served as judge for the 2026 Georgia Author of the Year Award for First Novel, naming Justin Haynes winner for Ibis, his remarkable novel about human exploitation in the Caribbean. Laura Dickerman was named the finalist for Hot Desk, a romantic comedy set in the New York publishing world.
Joan Silverman’s newsletter, Away From It All: Essays From Near + Far, highlights “essays by leading writers on any and everything, but the news.” The current issue features essays by Ann Hood, Howard Mansfield, and Aaron Angello. For more information, visit awayfromitall.substack.com.
“typewriter” by nicoleleec is licensed under CC BY 2.0.