Maddie Oatman

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…

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.”…

“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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…