Critical Notes

David L. Ulin interviews Toni Morrison live in LA on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Morrison reviewed by Carlin Romano. Judith Freeman. Michiko Kakutani. Jennifer Reese. Karen Long. Maggie Galehouse. Ellen Heltzel. Tim

NBCC board member Kevin Prufer’s “National Anthem” chosen for PW’s Best Books of the Year. And his “New European Poets,” edited with Wayne Miller, reviewed here. NBCC nonfiction award winner

Blushing, we see Critical Mass on the Readerville‘s Karen Templer’s list of Top 10 Book Blogs. Melville House’s Dennis Loy Johnson has revived MobyLives, which was launched in 1992. Cool

Mary Ann Gwinn on Seattle author Robert Clark’s “Dark Water:Flood and Redemption in the City of Masterpieces:” “Clark went off to Italy for a few years on a Guggenheim, intending

Bookbabes Ellen Heltzel and Margo Hammond will launch their new book, “Between the Covers: The Book Babes’ Guide to a Woman’s Reading Pleasures” at Inkwood Books in Tampa, Fl, on

NBCC board member Geeta Sharma-Jensen on “Home,” in which NBCC award winner Marilynne Robinson returns to “Gilead.” (Heads up: Marilynne Robinson, NBCC fiction award winner Bharati Mukherjee, and NBCC fiction

NBCC member and San Antonio playwright Gregg Barrios has a hit in Provincetown with his “Rancho Pancho” play, about Tennessee Williams and Pancho Rodriguez (pictured here in P-town’s Atlantic House

NBCC board member Geeta Sharma-Jensen talks to Daphne Beal. Former NBCC president John Freeman talks to the BBC about David Foster Wallace. And finds Julian Barnes’s new memoir “barbarously intelligent.”

David L. Ulin heard of the death of David Foster Wallace while in New York for an NBCC board meeting. He wrote this appreciation. Former NBCC board member J. Peder

Next week NBCC member Matt Weiland and his coeditor Sean Wilsey publish State by State: A Panoramic Portrait of America,” a 21st century take on updating the WPA writers guide