Critical Notes

Perhaps it’s a critic thing: Even when reading at leisure (as opposed to on assignment), I tend to divide literature into two broad categories: books I wish I’d reviewed, and

Pity the poet laureate? In Time, Sarah Fay looks at Kay Ryan and the duties of the new post. The experience is practically “On the Circuit.” Labels: Kay Ryan, Poetry,

We recently heard from NBCC member Carole Goldberg and the Hartford Courant’s editorial cutbacks, which included her position as books editor. After 23 years at the Courant, 7.5 as books

In The Nation, Eric Alterman writes on the future of newspapers. “The dearth of decent ideas designed to save newspapers—or reinvent them for the digital age in ways that preserve

Lara Vapnyar is one of the increasingly impressive roster of authors who have emigrated from Russia and other Eastern European countries and are now producing, in graceful and nuanced English

Balakian award winner Sam Anderson on “a history of hooch”: “The popular history of a humdrum object—that faddish genre in which the most boring items on your dining-room table (salt,

July 4th. A relatively somber Independence Day this year, with escalating gas prices, soaring unemployment rates (and not a few newspaper book pages and staffers at risk), Midwestern floods and

NBCC board member Art Winslow on Ethan Canin’s “America, America:” “It seems but a minor stretch—if that—to speculate that the seemingly redundant title of Ethan Canin’s new novel, “America America,”

NBCC fiction finalist Aleksandar Hemon has a way cool website for his new novel, “The Lazarus Project”—bells, whistles, accordion, melodica, words from the novel, contemporary photographs by Sarajevo born Velibor

And upcoming in the New York Times Sunday Book Review: NBCC member William Logan on Frank O’Hara’s “Selected Poems,” can’t resist “LANA TURNER HAS COLLAPSED!” NBCC member and first novelist