Maddie Oatman has interviewed musicians and writers for The Rumpus. She's the research editor at Mother Jones, where she also writes. A Boulder transplant, she can often be found on her bike, skis, or cooking with vegetables, and she wrote her English thesis on a gay red-winged monster and Billy the Kid. Follow her on Twitter or read occasional musings on her blog Oats.
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…
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,…
“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…
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…
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.”…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…