Critical Notes

Laura Collins-Hughes reviews Lysley Tenorio’s debut story collection, Monstress, for the Boston Globe. Steve Weinberg reviews Keija Parssinen’s novel The Ruins of Us for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. David Duhr

Last Friday Bethanne Patrick discussed the NBCC award nominees with board member Carolyn Kellogg and Balakian awardee Ron Charles for Follow the Reader, a weekly book chat on Twitter. You

Last Saturday the NBCC announced the finalists for its book awards. Here at Critical Mass, you can see the full list of finalists in all six book categories, as well

Planning out your 2012 reading? The Millions has a hefty list of some of the new year’s biggest titles, and Scott Esposito gathers up some forthcoming 2012 books, with a

Essayist, pundit, critic, and journalist Christopher Hitchens died last Thursday at 62. His 2010 memoir, Hitch-22, was a finalist for the NBCC award for autobiography. Arts & Letters Daily has

Michael Lindgren reviews Meghan O’Rourke’s new poetry collection, Once, for The L Magazine. Michelle Bailat-Jones takes an extended look at the work of controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq at the

Faulkner: The TV series? Writer-producer David Milch talks with the Los Angeles Times Carolyn Kellogg about his new deal with HBO to bring William Faulkner’s works to the screen. At

The year-end best-of lists have started to appear in earnest: The Atlantic’s Benjamin Schwarz picks his five favorites, the Guardian lists its books of the year, Library Journal lists its

Last Wednesday the winners of the National Book Awards were announced. (Carmela Ciuraru covered the festivities and took plenty of pictures for Electric Literature’s blog, The Outlet.) The fiction winner