Members and friends, if you’re planning to attend the Brooklyn Book Festival later this month, we’d love to invite you to some special events! On Friday, Sept. 25, at 7 p.m. Eastern, at Community Bookstore in Park Slope, NBCC President Adam Dalva is moderating a panel on literary criticism featuring Emily Greenhouse, Joumana Khatib, and NBCC board members Zoë Hu and Joanna Biggs. You can reserve a spot for this free event here.
And on Sunday, Sept. 20, at 4 p.m. Eastern, NBCC Secretary Lauren LeBlanc will be moderating a virtual panel on generational trauma in fiction with De’Shawn Charles Winslow, Harriet Clark, and Jasmin Iolani Hakes. You can register for this free event here.
Member Reviews/Essays
David Starkey reviewed Harper Perennial’s 2026 Olive Editions for California Review of Books.
Susan Shapiro wrote about the dangers of using AI and certain technology to teach writing for Salon.
Brian Tanguay reviewed John A. Jenkins’ Summer of ’71 and Emily Doyle’s Please Don’t Touch The Body for California Review of Books.
Edna Bonhomme reviewed Imani Thompson’s Honeyfor The Nation.
Heather Treseler wrote about The Poems of Sylvia Plath in “Who’s Afraid of Sylvia Plath?” for the Los Angeles Review of Books.
Linda Hitchcock reviewed Philip Norman’s Mr. Moonlightfor BookTrib.
Diane Josefowicz reviewed Karan Mahajan’s The Complex for The Providence Eye and The Cut Line, written by Carolina Pihelgas and translated from the Estonian by Daisy Hurford, for Necessary Fiction.
Frank Freeman reviewed Michael Mewshaw’s Not Heaven but Paradise for America.
Cory Oldweiler reviewed Silencio, written by Clyo Mendoza and translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney, for Southwest Review.
Tania Malik reviewed Water, Carbon, Time: Exploring Peatlands in a Warming World by Jennifer de Mooy for The Brooklyn Rail.
Deborah Copperud reviewed Lizzo’s new picture book, Lil Lizzo and Sasha B. Flootin’, and four other children’s books for Racket.
Mike Good reviewed three books, The Red Dress by Frank Huyler, Book of Hours by Ellen O’Connell Whittet, and Living in Fire by Antoine Volodine in the latest edition of Foreword magazine.
Member Interviews
Sullivan Summer interviewed scholar and historian Elizabeth Stordeur Pryor, author of Something We Said: Richard Pryor, a Notorious Word, and Me about the experience of having her work negatively reviewed. The interview appears in Sullivan’s new criticism newsletter, Black Lit Crit.
Chuck Augello interviewed Dave Zirin for Identity Theory about his new biography, The People’s Historian: The Outsized Life of Howard Zinn.
Laura Wetherington interviewed poet Leslie McIntosh about within group variance for BOMB.
Member News
NBCC member Hollay Ghadery’s novel, The Unravelling of Ou, has been longlisted for the Giller Prize.
Amy Fusselman’s novel Cloud Sixwill be published by Catapult on Sept. 22.
NBCC board member May-lee Chai will celebrate the launch of her new book, My Hungry Ghosts: Essays & Incantations, at City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco on Tuesday, Sept. 22 at 7 p.m. She will be joined by California Poet Laureate Lee Herrick for a literary conversation on ancestral hauntings, diaspora, and healing. The event is free and open to the public.
Susan Shapiro has two writing/publishing panels coming up in New York. She will moderate “Switching the Shelf: How Rethinking Your Genre Can Land You That Book Deal” on Sept. 16 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. Eastern at Penguin Random House, 1745 Broadway, with panelists Lee Oglesby, Kristine Puopolo, Kiele Raymond, Katie Gee Salisbury, Stacy Kim, and Amy Klein. And on Oct. 19 at 7 p.m. Eastern, she will moderate “How Three Pages Can Change Your Life” at P&T Knitwear with panelists Stacy Kim, Pronoy Sarkar, Nana Twumasi, Noah Michelson, Miya Lee, and Joy Peskin.
NBCC member Abby Manzella was interviewed by Debutiful about her upcoming short story collection, Ripples into the Wild.
Frank Freeman’s poem about the ICE shooting in Biddeford, Maine, “worst of the worst,” was published in The Opiate.
CRAFT recently featured Diane Josefowicz and her latest novel, The Great Houses of Pill Hill, in a hybrid review/interview by Shara Kronmal.
Jeanne Bonner’s translation, This Darkness Will Never End, has been nominated for the Italian Prose in Translation Award, a prize that is sponsored by the American Literary Translators Association. The work, which was published by Paul Dry Books in 2025, is the first-ever English translation of a 1962 short story collection by Edith Bruck that was inspired by her deportation to Auschwitz at the age of 13.