News

I’m wrapping up my book tour this week with a stop in Minneapolis for the Loft Literary Wordplay Festival, where I will be in conversation with Tommy Orange, moderated by Joseph Farag. I still have a few events on my calendar, but for the most part I’m done for this spring.

I really enjoyed talking about The Other Americans to audiences across the country and getting to hear their perspectives on it. If you’re curious about the book and would like to know more, you can find interviews with me in The Nation and Guernica.

I also did a video interview with the Los Angeles Times at the Festival of Books last month, a radio interview with Maggie Downs and Tod Goldberg on their KCOD show Open Book , and an audio interview with Pamela Paul for The New York Times Book Review podcast.

In other book-related news, reviews of The Other Americans have appeared recently in the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, the Financial Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, and The New York Times.

Friends! Those of you who enjoy listening to audiobooks are in for a treat. Penguin Random House released a fantastic audio version for The Other Americans, with a cast of nine actors voicing the nine different narrators! You can listen to samples from the audio book here. And here is information about where you can buy it.

Update: AudioFile has awarded the audio book an Earphones award.

While I was traveling, reviews of The Other Americans appeared in the Guardian, the Observer, the Seattle Times, and NPR . Profiles appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle and Lit Hub. I also did interviews with Electric Literature, the Observer, and KQED Forum.

Also last month, while I was dashing out of my hotel room to catch a train, I found out that the Today Show had featured The Other Americans in a segment on book clubs! Isaac Fitzgerald recommended the novel and Alejandra Ramos suggested a menu to match it.  You can watch the segment here. And please tell your book club about it!

Photo: Powell’s marquee.

I spoke to Lulu Garcia-Navarro on NPR’s Weekend Edition about my new novel, writing from different perspectives, and the diversity of immigrant experiences. You can listen to the interview here:

The Guardian‘s Hadley Freeman profiled me for the paper, ahead of the release of my new book in the UK. Here’s a taste:

This feeling of separateness – of being, as she puts it, “the person in the corner observing everything but who no one pays attention to” – would become a running theme in her life. Despite being working class, her parents sent her to a French-speaking school, usually the choice of upper-class families, “so that was another feeling of, you’re in here but not of us,” she says. Lalami grew up speaking Arabic at home, French at school and, eventually, English at work, and this flowing between different languages taught her that the usual barriers between people are more porous than most assume.

You can read the rest here. Early reviews of The Other Americans in the UK have appeared in the Times and The Economist.