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.

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.”

“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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

“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.

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:

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.

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.

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).

“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.

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?).

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.

-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 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.”

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.

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.

-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?

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.