Deborah Baker‘s The Convert made the review rounds this week: the LA Times, Forbes, Washington Post, and Kirkus Reviews all posted critiques of this peculiar and intriguing book. “The story of Maryam Jameelah is an extraordinary but painfully confused true tale,” writes WaPo‘s Pamela Constable. “Having romanticized Islam from afar and imagined it as a secure, all-embracing escape from human foibles and fears, she instead found herself clashing with the cultural expectations, personal conflicts and political feuds of an alien society that viewed her with a mixture of suspicion and awe.”

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Lucky Fish by Aimee Nezhukumatathil has won the Eric Hoffer Grand Prize for books. The US Review of Books writes: “By enfolding folk beliefs, tales, or superstitions into contemporary experience, place, or situations, these poems delineate a fascinating, unexpected adventure.”

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reviews Tayari Jones‘ Silver Sparrow, praising the way “the exchanges between mothers and daughters are often moving and always ring true.” …more

“It’s funny—when it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. For fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth,” Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow, says in a self-interview on The Nervous Breakdown.

“I took sparrow from the hymn ‘His Eye Is On The Sparrow’ — being the sparrow is the least among us,” Jones told NPR. “Because I think that’s what Dana [the protagonist] is, she’s a silver sparrow.” Listen to an interview of Jones and read an excerpt of Silver Sparrow on the NPR website. …more

Woot! Adam Levin won the NY Public Library’s Young Lion Fiction Award for The Instructions. Looks like Mr. Levin’s getting the drinks next time (the award comes with a $10,000 cash prize).

The Book Spy blog spots Levin on the subway and wonders about his flashy jacket.

May’s book club selections are Daniel Orozco‘s short story collection Orientation and Tayari Jones‘ novel Silver Sparrow.

Of Orientation, Yiyun Li writes: “The stories in this collection make one marvel at the bigness of their creator’s mind—each of them has the depth and scope of a novel.”

Tayari Jones, author of the Rumpus Book Club’s May pick Silver Sparrow gets love from The Village Voice: “Jones… is fast defining middle-class black Atlanta the way Cheever did Westchester.” Read an excerpt of the book on Scribd. HTML Giant writes: “powerful and unforgettable and full of soul. This is another one of those books I want to just drive down the street throwing at people because it feels so necessary.”

Sean Singer explains why he chose Tracy K. Smith‘s Life on Mars as a Poetry Club Pick. …more

Earthquakes breeding nuclear meltdowns, tornadoes razing towns in the South, immense tropical storms: the news never fails to feed us weather calamities. That’s why Jim Shepard‘s You Think That’s Bad will surely spark a sky-gazing reader’s attention: “He’s our leading miniaturist of massive catastrophe, the Jon Krakauer—or is it the Michael Bay?—of the MFA set, turning out short historical fictions that increasingly read like trailers for our disaster-movie future,” writes Slate’s Jennifer Schuessler, in a review this week. …more

Dean Young is one of the freshest, boldest, most confident poets out there; his poems’ structures are completely unique, often winding out of control before settling into moments of recognition and revelation. We all feel/suspended over a drop into nothingness./Once you get close enough, you see what/one is stitching is the human heart. Another/is vomiting wings.  Hell, even now I love life. Camille Dungy, a Rumpus Poetry Club Board member, explains why she chose Young’s new volume Fall Higher for April’s selection; as if, after the verses above, you need anymore reasons to love him.

The LA Times reviews Jim Shepard‘s You Think That’s Bad: “These stories bring their first-person narrators right up to the point of obliteration, leaving us exhilarated and despairing at once.”

New York Times critic Thomas Mallone writes that Shepard’s “preference for historical quests, for real people’s big gestures, may help keep American short fiction from falling asleep in the snug little precincts of its usual subject matter.”

The Rumpus Book Club interviews Lidia Yuknavitch. Dawn West of PANK writes of Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water: “The reader is intimately aware of the body, her body, and what bodies go through.” Caleb Powell reviews Chronology for Bookslut. The Oregonian calls it “a courageous and saucy book.”

David Orr takes on public poetry in the latest issue of Poetry—”public poetry” being “the ocean of humanity that votes in elections, watches the Super Bowl, and generally makes America what it is, for better and worse.” In Timothy Donnelly‘s Cloud Corporation, he finds a voice willing to connect, both whimsically and desperately, with the questions that confront not only the poet, but also the sea of people swimming around him, humanity as a whole.

Maureen N. McClane interviews Donnelly for the Boston Review.

Bhanu Kapil talks about poem-essays, using Jena Osman’s The Network as an example, on the Poetry Foundation website.

Time to start April’s book club selection, The Convert, by Deborah Baker. Says Bookforum’s reviews editor Michael Miller: “I think Stephen Elliott has good taste, so I usually check out what he chooses for his reading group at The Rumpus. That’s how I heard about Deborah Baker’s The Convert.”

For May, book club editors just couldn’t make up their minds, so they’re trying something unusual: half of book club members will receive Daniel Orozco‘s story collection Orientation, while the other half will get Tayari Jones‘s Silver Sparrow. It’s a mystery flavor surprise! …more

The Rumpus Book club reveals how Jim Shepard might just be your favorite catastrophist.

Lidia Yuknavitch‘s sentences can be rambling and unorthodox, says Books and Brews blogger of her new book The Chronology of Water. “Easily the most important thing to grasp from this memoir is the idea that memory is an ever-shifting entity.” Read more, and watch the book video here.

Who influenced Deus Ex Machina author Andrew Altschul? Raymond Carver, Salman Rushdie, John Irving, and more. Read why on Courier-Journal.com

So you think you’re a poet? Noelle Kocot has written 1,300 new poems since the release of her most recent collection, The Bigger World. Marvel at this prolific writer by reading the Rumpus Poetry Club interview with Kocot.

News of the strange: Tao Lin was reportedly riding a bus this week that got pulled over  because the driver seemed drunk. Upon further investigation, it turns out police suspicions were founded, and the driver was arrested. True to his nature, Lin spent the duration of the experience sending out Twitter updates.

Roxane Gay examines Lidia Yuknavitch‘s Chronology of Water, the current Rumpus Book Club selection. Her review is organized into handy sections, and she ends with an affirmative: “I will just say I fucking loved this book and I strongly encourage anyone reading this to buy the book immediately and then keep it beneath your pillow or shove it down your pants or crack open your rib cage and hold the book next to your heart.” If you join The Rumpus Book Club you can still receive a copy. Huzzah!

Rumpus Book Club member, Anna Newbold, shares her thoughts about last month’s Book Club selection, Jim Shepard’s You Think That’s Bad, ruminating on the book’s familial relationships and rivalries.

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Deus Ex Machina made the pages of The Wall Street Journal; reviewer Sam Sacks calls Andrew Altschul‘s novel about a reality TV show “heady and fast-paced.”

SanJose.com also reviews Deus Ex Machina, saying “it is enough to make you doubt yourself and the world.”

Louisville’s Leo Weekly sings Timothy Donnelly‘s praises, saying that his latest poems in The Cloud Corporation “teem with anxiety-soaked images of existence lived at the behest of a credit-card economy that defines a massive corporatization of life, reducing even the individual to a commodity.” Sure sounds dark, but The New Yorker named this collection the best of the year, and as reviewer Sean Patrick Hill notes, “Donnelly’s response to the madness has obviously hit a nerve.”

Still haven’t read Roy Kesey‘s Pacazo? The Nervous Breakdown blog has posted an excerpt that might answer your question: What’s a “pacazo”?

Tao Lin gets mentioned in a Guardian article about the challenges of naming characters. “I chose names that would not cause the reader to feel like there was hidden meaning in them, or that the characters were symbolic or the story was an allegory,” he says, though with a novel out whose protagonist is called Richard Yates, it’s hard to understand what he means exactly.

Don’t miss author Lydia Yuknavitch‘s wonderful essay, “About a Boob,”  about how she created the image for the front of her book, The Chronology of Water, which is our March book club selection.

Book Club member Josh Anastasia reviews Jim Shepard‘s You Think That’s Bad.

Our Book Club interviews Roy Kesey, author of Pacazo, about Faulkner, historiography, and cheap cab rides.

Our April selection is The Convert, by Deborah Baker, a novel about a Jewish girl from New York who rejected the western way of life and found herself in Islam.

“How do you satirize something that’s already a parody of itself?” asks Michael Schaub of NPR in his write-up of Andrew Altschul‘s Deus Ex Machina. Schaub finds Altschul’s attempts to do so pretty successful, calling the novel brilliantly observed and praising the book for showing how “there’s not much reality in reality television, and even good intentions can be corrupted to a horrifying degree when money and ratings are involved.”

The WSJ‘s Speakeasy blog features Altschul’s essay about researching Deus Ex Machina and his realization that reality TV is basically just pornography. Hint: A certain website based out of the San Francisco Armory building features prominently. …more

We’ve compiled links to footage of several interviews with Jim Shepard, whose You Think That’s Bad is our February Book Club pick.

Truthdig has posted an excerpt of Andrew Foster Altschul‘s new novel Deus Ex Machina. The scene shows a Lost-type reality show about to start its 13th season: …more

I remember/ the trick of thinking through infinity, a crowd of eyes/ against an asphalt wall, writes Timothy Donnelly in his poem “The Cloud Corporation.” If you haven’t had the chance to pore through his latest collection by the same name, you can find some of his new poems on the Poetry Foundation website.

The Women of the Rumpus, including Jami Attenberg, Elissa Bassist, Justine Hope Blau, Nell Boeschenstein and Michelle Orange, read essays from their collection, Rumpus Women, Vol. I at Greenlight Bookstore in Brooklyn. “When asked whether the writers had anything in common,” writes Shannon Firth who attended the reading, “Ms. Bassist said ‘honesty’ and also ‘ballsiness’ or I guess ‘ovariness.’” …more

You can read notes from our book club discussion of Pacazo, Roy Kesey‘s new novel that reminded one reader of The Sound and the Fury, “with an unreliable narrator whose narrative goes back and forth in time.”

If you’re in Minneapolis (current temperature: 18 degrees), a nice way to stave off frostbite is to hulk around Adam Levin‘s The Instructions. The amount of blood pumping through your body as you try to support the book’s staggering weight should keep you warm. Or, according to Twin Cities’s Metro magazine, spend the morning cozied up to a fire getting lost in this opus, and you’ll forget all about the blizzard outside.

The Instructions was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards fiction category, though the award went to To the End of the Land, by David Grossman. Check out the full list of 2010 winners here.

Did Tao Lin really get married? The New York Observer investigates the root of a tweet proclaiming Lin asked longtime girlfriend Megan Boyle’s hand last week.

Poetry gets so ignored. A moment to appreciate the bad-ass poets of the Rumpus Poetry Club and some of their accolades this past year:

Timothy Donnelly‘s Cloud Corporation earned a spot among “The Year’s Best Poetry” according to NPR (also on the list: Rumpus contributor and all-star poet Matthew Zapruder).

The Believer‘s David Gorin reviews Cloud Corporation, finding in it hope for the new year: “these poems dream that music and imaginative play can keep us awake in the still-redeemable world, authorizing that dream through its interrogation.” …more

“San Francisco is the best place in the country to be a writer,” says author Andrew Altschul in a profile by Publisher’s Weekly about his new book Deux Ex Machina. Considering Altschul’s novel takes on the morally vapid world of reality TV, we’re certainly glad he likes his surroundings. Otherwise, his world of termite mound competitions and waterboarding on a fictional reality show might be a bit too much for any writer to handle.

The Chicago Tribune calls All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost, by Lan Samantha Chang, “an intense little novel,” depicted with “insight and compassion.”

Find out in The Millions what Adam Levin, author of The Instructions, read this year.

Read this to know why the Cloud Corporation author Timothy Donnelly included Matthew Zapruder, a member of The Rumpus Advisory Board, in his list of six favorite contemporary poets.

Announcing the January book club pick: Pacazo, by Roy Kesey–the story of an American historian in Peru, and his attempts to rebuild after the storms of El Nino shred apart life as he knows it.

Poet and essayist S.X. Rosenstock recaps a night in West Hollywood with readers from Rumpus Women, Volume 1 on The Huffington Post. “Prior to this I’ve never been at a reading where four writers in a row were able to offer a high level of artistic craft in their prose AND employ an unerring sense of judgment about how to render challenging subject matter AND read the work aloud in a open-hearted, appealing way,” she gushes.

In Nor-Cal? Check out the next Rumpus Women, Volume 1 event this Monday night at 7pm at The Makeout Room, featuring authors Kathleen Alcott, Julie Greicius, Antonia Crane, Sarah Fran Wisby, and Michelle Tea! …more

NPR’s Bill Goldstein took on Adam Levin’s “thousand-page debut splash,” The Instructions, calling it “daunting enough as a matter of real estate alone.” Read Goldstein’s review to find out whether he thinks it prevails in the Tolstoy Challenge (are books over a thousand pages worth reading over War and Peace?).

Canada’s The National Post offers: “It is rare to find a writer like Levin who can inspire real concern over the meaning of words.” …more

The Guardian‘s Nicholas Lezard examines Tao Lin‘s Richard Yates. “It is all achingly hip,” Lezard writes, “in its studied avoidance of the depths that literary fiction is meant to plumb. And that might be the end of the matter – but I don’t think it is.” Read more here.

Bookforum.com calls Adam Levin’s The Instructions “Napoleonically ambitious.” “The book is irresistible,” writes Douglas Wolk. “Its chief flaws are too many ideas, too much enthusiasm, too much intoxication with the glory of its language.” Criticisms that Levin would probably embrace with open arms.

The San Francisco Chronicle calls The Instructions “riotous, gigantic and disturbing.”

Reviewer Maud Newton praises Levin for engendering sympathy in the reader for the schemes of a thug-like protagonist.

And Powell’s names The Instructions their new Indiespensable book.

How a Brooklyn musician uses Tumblr to cover a song a night (roughly) and write accompanying life stories. …more

-You can still get a copy of The Rumpus Women Volume 1, edited by Julie Greicius and Elissa Bassist (whose interview with Amy Sedaris is outlandishly funny) if you sign up by November 15th.

-Elizabeth Alexander‘s experience as a black American results in poems like “Affirmative Action Blues” and “Race” in her new collection, Crave Radiance. The Hartford Advocate reviews. …more

The Columbia Spectator talks to Timothy Donnelly about his new collection of poems, The Cloud Corporation, revealing his patience with the craft, propensity for pauses, and how he relishes the “quirky aspects of language.”

The Chicago Tribune calls Adam Levin‘s The Instructions “bold, fast, funny, and ambitious.” …more

In a new artistic video by Amanda Joy, Surf Guru author Doug Dorst reads his story “Little Reptiles,” and creepy crawlies start to come out of the woodworks (well, background).

In another artistic video, Richard Yates author Tao Lin discusses his forthcoming iPhone app called “North American Hamsters,” which features 60 hamsters who give advice. Also included: the story behind the rodent fetish, and a demonstration on how to draw a hamster.

A National Post Q&A with Lin calls him a “literary hustler” because of his “tireless” self-promotion and impressive collection of followers.

Riverfront Times has a brief Q&A with Adam Levin, author of the massive tome The Instructions. Asked whether he wanted the book to be so long, Levin admits: “I had no plan when I started writing. It developed in such a way, and the I wrote till I was done.”

“True life plot-twists for Citrus County author John Brandon”, in The Saint Petersburg Times,  takes a look at the development of John Brandon‘s literary career and writing addiction.

The Rumpus got busy reviewing its own book club picks this week, with Kevin Thomas’s comic review of Lan Samantha Chang‘s All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost and book club member John Brown’s effusive critique of Adam Levin‘s The Instructions.

Well-Read Wife‘s Mandy doesn’t find anything wrong with The Instructions, but wrote a letter in order to break off her relationship with the book for now. …more

-How big is Adam Levin‘s The Instructions? Joseph Michael Owens reveals four demonstrative photos.

-What does Tao Lin sound like in person? A clip of him reading at Litquake on October 4th.

-Is Lin’s Richard Yates immensely relatable? Corey K. from City Arts thinks so.

-”Is Tao Lin’s medicated prose my generation’s brain voice?” asks Bookslut’s Lorian Long.

-”I sometimes feel that MFA programs have churned out a bunch of slick writing with no soul or balls — is this just me?” asks Corey from the Rumpus Book Club during its online interview of Lan Samantha Chang.

-”What was your approach to the sentence-making in this book?  Since you were writing about poets, did the poetry of the language seem more important than usual?” wonders Edan Lepucki when she interviews Chang for The Millions.

Lan Samantha Chang‘s novel All is Forgotten, Nothing is Lost appeared in the New York Times Book Review, making her and Tao Lin the 3rd and 4th Rumpus Book Club authors we’ve chosen who’s also been reviewed by New York’s esteemed publication. The review mostly focuses on the plot of Chang’s novel, and considering the book’s setting is a prestigious writing school, gives Chang credit for understanding her subject matter in and out.

The Harvard Crimson didn’t have such a favorable opinion of Chang’s work, saying that it “lacks polish and dimension.”

Tao Lin also got a write-up in the NY Times Book Review, in which Charles Bock describes what he sees as Lin’s strategy: “Lin aspires to the emotionally devastating work that is Yates’s legacy. If he falls short, though, he’s maintained enough ironic distance to have an out: Just kidding, see?”

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We shipped The Instructions, by Adam Levin, to our Book Club members yesterday, a full month ahead of publication. There are whispers that this is one of McSweeney’s best yet; those signed up will get to delve into this thick tome and decide for themselves. Interested? Click here to join (we’ll ship for another week).

There’s a video trailer for Levin’s novel, which is about a revolution of sorts, and while it doesn’t reveal much about the book, you might find it helpful for future schemes.

The Instructions also made the Chicagoist’s Back-to-Indoors Reading List, though with September and October’s colors and clear skies, reading outside is still highly suggested. …more

-Maybe you are tired of looking at a computer screen. Maybe you’re just not a visual person. Maybe you want a new lens into Richard Yates, by Tao Lin. Whatever your needs, Largehearted Boy has just the right medicine: a musical playlist, created by Lin, that relates in some way to his new novel.

It’s not very long, but Lin’s descriptions of the songs flesh out Richard Yates’s central characters a little more. Plus, listen to it while reading and you can have an actual soundtrack behind the narrative instead of having to imagine one. …more