Your reviews seed this roundup. Please send items, including news about recent publications and honors, to [email protected]. (Current members only.) Please only send links that do not require a subscription or a username and password.

For Electric Literature, Adam Morgan interviews Mary Wisniewski about her biography of Nelson Algren. For Chicago magazine, Morgan selects the year’s best books about Chicago.

NBCC Board Member Jane Ciabattari covers the #NBCCLeonard finalists in her Lit Hub column. Her BBC "Ten Books to Read in December" column features Jeanette Winterson, Siri Hustvedt, and more.

Mike Lindgren reviews “Garments Against Women” by Anne Boyer for Prairie Schooner.

Elizabeth Lund writes on the 5 best poetry books of 2016 for the Washington Post.

John Domini reviews D. Foy’s “Patricide” for the Brooklyn Rail.

Michael Magras reviews “Gesell Dome” by Guillermo Saccomanno for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Tony Miksanek reviews “The Undoing Project” by Michael Lewis for Booklist.

NBCC Board Member Colette Bancroft reviews Michael Tisserand's "Krazy Kat" for the Tampa Bay Times.

Julia M. Klein reviews Armando Lucas Correa's "The German Girl" for the Forward.

In November, National Book Critics Circle members will begin nominating and voting for the fourth John Leonard award for first book in any genre. In the run-up to the first round of voting, we'll be posting a series of #NBCCLeonard blog essays on promising first books. The twentieth in our series is NBCC board member Colette Bancroft on Max Porter's Grief Is the Thing With Feathers (Graywolf).

Forget every preconception you might have about novels of loss. Max Porter's debut book, Grief Is the Thing With Feathers, is a rare bird you have not seen before.

After a young woman's sudden death, her husband and two young sons are paralyzed by pain and disbelief. Then, once the mourners have drifted away, an enormous crow appears at their door.

The bird is as surreal and disorienting as the experience of shocking loss. His size and form shift, from a huge feathery mass with "a rich smell of decay, a sweet furry stink of just-beyond-edible food, and moss, and leather, and yeast," to a humanlike creature who curls up in an armchair and reads memoirs — or a warrior who vanquishes demons. 

As Crow says, "I was friend, excuse, deus ex machina, joke, symptom, figment, spectre, crutch, toy, phantom, gag, analyst and babysitter." Add to that Jungian archetype and mythical trickster figure from cultures around the globe — and, in some ways, actual bird.

The story is told in alternating short chapters narrated by the Dad, the Boys and the bird itself. The book's jacket calls it a novel, but at just over 100 small-format pages it feels more like a novella or long short story. Parts of it are poetry, others read like the script of a play or a grim fairy tale. Its shifting forms, its beak-by-jowl juxtapositions of the quotidian and the hallucinatory, render perfectly the bafflement of extreme grief, which can never be anticipated, only survived.

Grief is nested in literary allusions. Its title is a dark twist on one of Emily Dickinson's poems, which begins:

"Hope" is the thing with feathers —

That perches in the soul —

And sings the tune without the words —

And never stops — at all —

Crow evokes his corvid cousin in Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven, although this bird has a much larger vocabulary (not to mention a sense of humor). Most importantly for the Dad, a literary scholar, he's a reference to The Life and Songs of the Crow, a strange and powerful collection of poems by Ted Hughes, longtime British poet laureate best known as the husband, then widower, of American poet and novelist Sylvia Plath.

But the reader need not ever have heard of Dickinson or Hughes to feel this book's emotional dive and soar. It's a novel about grief that in some ways mocks the traditional novel about grief:

"How physical my missing is," the Dad says. "I miss her so much it is a vast golden prince, a concert hall, a thousand trees, a lake, nine thousand buses, a million cars, twenty million birds and more. The whole city is my missing her.

“Eugh, said Crow, you sound like a fridge magnet."

And yet. As Crow tells him in the book's first pages, "I won't leave until you don't need me anymore."

Colette Bancroft has been the book editor of the Tampa Bay Times, the Southeast’s largest newspaper, since 2007. She has reviewed books for the Times, the Arizona Daily Star and other publications for more than 25 years. Before she became a full-time journalist, Bancroft taught English and American literature at the University of Florida, the University of South Florida and the University of Arizona. She lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. Her term on the NBCC board ends in 2017.

Your reviews seed this roundup. Please send items, including news about recent publications and honors, to [email protected]. (Current members only.) Please only send links that do not require a subscription or a username and password.

What’s your favorite book about resistance? The NBCC is launching a new NBCC Reads series. Send a critical essay for posting on the Critical Mass blog between now and January 15, 2017 to [email protected]

Are you interested in running for the NBCC Board? The deadline for board statements is December 19th.

NBCC board member Marion Winik reviews The Next by Stephanie Gangi for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. For Newsday, she reviews Whatever Happened to Interracial Love by Kathleen Collins,  How to Survive a Plague by David France, Moonglow by Michael Chabon, and Swing Time by Zadie Smith.

NBCC board member and Star Tribune books editor Laurie Hertzel reviews Shakespeare and Company: A History of the Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart edited by Krista Halverson for the Minneapolis Star Tribune, as well as three memoirs: All At Sea, by Decca Aitkenhead, The Unquiet Daughter, by Danielle Flood, and Ghost Songs, by Regina McBride. She also reviews Schoolhouse, a memoir by Marc Nieson; Black Elk: The Life of an American Visionary, a biography by Joe Jackson, and Footnotes from the World’s Greatest Bookstores, by Bob Eckstein. Finally, she writes about how readers choose their next book to read. (One man lets his cat choose.)

NBCC board member Colette Bancroft reviews Moonglow by Michael Chabon for the Tampa Bay Times.

NBCC board member Kate Tuttle interviews Michael Chabon for the Los Angeles Times. In her latest Boston Globe column, she reviews Black Elk by Joe Jackson, JFK and the Masculine Mystique by Steven Watts, and Table Manners by Jeremiah Tower. She also writes about Michael Ward’s The Sea is Quiet Tonight for the Boston Globe’s “Story Behind the Book” feature.

Joseph Peschel reviews Moonglow by Michael Chabon for the News & Observer.

NBCC poetry finalist Ada Limón writes A New National Anthem for Buzzfeed.

In The San Francisco Chronicle, Heller McAlpin writes that A.L. Kennedy’s “agonizingly penetrating" Serious Sweet, "is at heart an oddball love story that features what is probably Kennedy’s most hopeful ending yet.” McAlpin also reviews The Glass Universe for NPR.org, in which Dava Sobel once again “highlights women’s often under-appreciated role in the history of science.” And for The Barnes & Noble Review, McAlpin extols Richard Pevear and Larissa Volkhonsky’s new translation of Alexander Pushkin’s Novels, Tales, Journeys.

Julie R. Enszer reviews Therese Svoboda’s Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola Ridge at The Rumpus.

Rod Davis reviews Without Getting Killed or Caught: The Life and Music of Guy Clark by Tamara Saviano for Lone Star Literary Life. 

Jennifer Howard writes about digital privacy and data love for The Times Literary Supplement. She’s also featured on the TLS Voices podcast, discussing the review with TLS editor Stig Abell and commissioning editor Thea Lenarduzzi.

Julia M. Klein reviews David France's How to Survive a Plague for the Boston Globe.

Former NBCC board member and Balakian recipient Steven G. Kellman reviews Memoirs of a Polar Bear by Yoko Tawada (translated by Susan Bernofsky) for the Boston Globe.

Judy Krueger reviews The Terranauts by T.C. Boyle at Litbreak.

Anjali Enjeti reviews April Ayers Lawson's Virgin and Other Stories for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Alexis Burling reviews Michael Chabon’s Moonglow for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Natalie Bakopoulos reviews Swing Time by Zadie Smith for Fiction Writers Review.

Paul Wilner reviews two new books by Philip Levine for the San Francisco Chronicle.

Daniel Asa Rose interviews Billy Collins for the Observer and writes an essay called “Separated at Birth” for Harper’s. 

Every year NBCC members are asked to nominate titles to be finalists for the book awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, criticism, biography, and autobiography. Any title that receives 20 percent of members' votes automatically becomes a finalist. Among the past finalists advanced by member votes were Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma. We hope you'll take the time to participate via the survey that comes to your in-box. The survey will close on Dec. 19 at 5 p.m. EST.

Tom Beer is books and travel editor of Newsday and NBCC board president

What's your favorite work of resistance literature?

That's the question that launches this year's NBCC Reads series, which draws upon the bookish passions of NBCC members and honorees. (NBCC Reads from previous years here.) At this time of cultural shift, what might be the resonant images and messages from The Diary of Anne Frank and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale,or  Maus,  books by James Baldwin, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Vaclev Havel, Philip Roth, Milan Kundera?  What's your favorite book on the theme of resistance? Send your critical essay for posting on the National Book Critics Circle's Critical Mass blog between now and January 15, 2017  to [email protected].

It's time once again to elect new members to the Board.

Board members serve a three-year term, beginning the day after the awards presentation in March. The Board manages the NBCC's administrative tasks and selects the books for each year's NBCC Book Awards, as well as choosing those honored by the Ivan Sandrof and Nona Balakian Awards. For more information about Board duties and responsibilities, please visit our website (at bookcritics.org).

We have 8 vacancies to fill this year. All voting members of the NBCC may choose to put themselves forward to stand for election. If you are interested in running for the Board, please send a candidate statement to Vice President/NewsWire Kate Tuttle at [email protected]. Statements should be no longer than 300 words, and ideally will include both a sense of the candidate's work as a reviewer, any other relevant experience, and vision for what that person would contribute to the Board, if elected. In an earlier email, I had mentioned an incorrect deadline for accepting candidate statements -- we will be accepting candidate statements until December 19. 

On December 20, we will launch the election using a Survey Monkey tool that will allow all voting members to cast their votes. The election will close on January 9. Winners will be decided by popular vote. We should have the results of the election the following day, and will communicate them first to candidates, then to the membership at large.

Please don't hesitate to contact us at [email protected] with any questions about the process. We hope to get a great new slate of candidates and that all voting members participate in selecting our new Board.


 




 

 

Tom Beer is Books and Travel Editor at Newsday and NBCC Board President

We’re happy to report that the NBCC membership has spoken, and the 2016 John Leonard Prize finalists have been chosen. Here’s this year’s terrific list:

The Mothers, by Brit Bennett (Riverhead) 
The Girls, by Emma Cline (Random House) 
Here Comes the Sun, by Nicole Dennis-Benn (Liveright) 
Homegoing, by Yaa Gyasi (Knopf) 
The Nix, by Nathan Hill (Knopf) 
Grief Is the Thing with Feathers, by Max Porter (Graywolf) 

Nominations for the Leonard prize, for a first book in any genre, are open to any NBCC member, and the six finalists are those titles with the most nominations. In a first this year, a panel of member-volunteers will read the finalists and select the winner, to be announced in January. The John Leonard Prize will be presented at the NBCC Awards Ceremony at The New School in New York on March 16, 2017.