Rob Spillman

Uwem Akpan's Say You Are One of Them is a lousy Oprah Book Club choice. As the editor of Gods and Soldiers: the Penguin Anthology of Contemporary African Fiction, and as the editor of the literary magazine Tin House, one would think that I would be happy with Oprah's choice...

This past weekend the entire publishing industry descended on Washington, DC for the annual BookExpo gathering. Publishers big and small desperately flouted their "big" books for next fall to professional book buyers from around the world. In the dour, airless convention hall the publishing industrial complex showed off its old-fashioned...

Gravity's Rainbow, Dog Soldiers, JR--The National Book Awards winners for fiction in 1974, 1975, and 1976. Watergate, the end of Vietnam, the OPEC oil "crisis", corporate corruption and unchecked capitalism--and American writers rose to the challenge of their times. But where are the young writers of today? I was encouraged...

A public figure admitting they made a mistake? Stunning. On her show today, Oprah flat out said that she was wrong about James Frey and that the truth does matter. For an hour she dragged Frey over the coals for lying to her and a million plus others who...

Last night on the Larry King Show, Oprah called in to defend James Frey, who has been raked over the coals after the Smoking Gun revealed, in meticulous detail including police records, that he was no "Criminal with a big C", but just another hard-partying frat boy. Among many exaggerations,...

Trying to predict how a literary book will sell is an inexact science, to say the least. You can throw chicken bones, add up the letters in an author's name and divide this by the number of Chins in the Chinese phonebook and multiply by that number of Liz Taylor's...

'Tis the season for judgment. What are the best books of the year? This is the burning question a majority of media outlets -- from talk shows to hometown newspapers to blogs -- believe needs to be answered. Not surprisingly, the mega-publishing houses lobby for their books with the muscle...

When people find out that I am an editor and writer, they invariably ask me, “What are you reading now?” and I invariably seize up like a deer in headlights. I stare blankly back and make silent guppy movements with my mouth. This shouldn’t be a trick question for me....