This week’s feature is Lauren Groff’s new novel, Arcadia (Voice/Hyperion). Groff’s past works include a collection, Delicate, Edible Birds and Other Stories (2009), and a novel, The Monsters of Templeton (2008). Her short stories have appeared in a number of journals, including the New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, One Story, and [...]

I had to go four or five pages into my junk email folder to find one. It was from a Dr. Obadiah Maliafia of the Central Bank of Nigeria. The email says that my $10.7 million in overdue inheritance funds: “HAS BEEN GAZZETED TO BE RELEASED TO YOU VIA THE FOREIGN REMMITANCE DEPARTMENT OF OUR BANK.”

After reading Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani’s debut novel I Do Not Come to You By Chance (Hyperion, May 2009), the missive from Dr. Maliafia read like a finely tuned piece of art: the formal language, the capital letters, the amount of money – a perfect example of the 419 email scam.

E. Lockhart’s latest YA-novel–wherein Frankie Landau-Banks infiltrates her boarding school’s all-male secret society–is a lot of fun. The book is also a love letter to teenage girls asking them to value their own worth. As an antidote to the swooning of the Twilight crowd, Frankie’s gutsy determination is a welcome dose of a different kind of romance.