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Three Percent #53: Are the NBCCs the Greatest American Book Awards?

On this week’s podcast, we welcome National Book Critics Circle board member Carolyn Kellogg to talk about the NBCC awards, the changes to the National Book Award (which set me off on a bit of a paranoid rant), Bookish and its suckishness, and a variety of other literary topics. I also want to add a bit of an update. ...

Criticism Is Where It's At [NBCC Awards]

This weekend, the National Book Critics Circle announced the finalists for its books wards for publishing 2011 and—not to bury the lede—including Dubravka Ugresic’s Karaoke Culture as one of the five finalists in the Criticism category. This is the first major book award that one of our titles has been ...

NBCC: Why Translation Matters?

A couple weeks ago, the National Book Critics Circle hosted a panel at Prairie Lights Books in Iowa City entitled “Why Translation Matters?” and featuring Sarah Fay, Christopher Merrill, Cole Swenson, Russell Valentino, (incorrectly identified as Rudolph Valentino on the NBCC info page, which isn’t ...

NBCC

Just announced: Roberto Bolano’s 2666 has won the 2008 National Book Critic Circle Award for Fiction. It’s always great to see a translation win a NBCC. (I might be mistaken, but I think the last book to do it was Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl back a few years ago.) Last month, Marcela ...

National Book Critics Circle Award Finalists

On Saturday, the NBCC announced the finalists for the series of awards they hand out every year. As always, all of the finalists are pretty strong, and there are two works in translation up for prizes. Bolano’s 2666 is a fiction finalist, and Pierre Martory’s The Landscapist is a poetry finalist. I must say, ...

John Freeman on America's Non-Reading Culture

John Freeman—President of the National Book Critics Circle—has a post at his Guardian books blog about the recent report that 25% of Americans didn’t read a book last year. America has always had one of the lowest literacy rates in the western world. The former book review editor of the LA Times, Steve ...