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1 month ago | 
theparisreview.org | Jamie Quatro
By Jamie Quatro March 25, 2025 A painting in Blair Hobbs’s new exhibition features a cut-out drawing of Flannery O’Connor in a pearl choker and purple V-necked dress. She’s flanked by drawings of peacocks and poppies; a birthday cake on metallic gold paper floats above her head. It is titled, like the exhibition, Birthday Cake for Flannery.
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2 months ago | 
gadsdentimes.com | Jamie Quatro
Jamie Quatro has published a novel, “Fire Sermon,” and a book of stories, “I Want to Show You More.” This powerful new novel makes clear: she is a major Southern writer with some very new ideas on the old themes. Although “Two-Step Devil” is throughout mystical, fantastic, hallucinatory, magical, it begins in the guise of a realistic story, set just inside the Alabama border, near Lookout Mountain. The protagonist of the novel is the Prophet, given name: Winston.
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Oct 6, 2024 | 
lithub.com | Jamie Quatro
When I was a kid I used to sneak out of bed at night to look at a painting in one of my mother’s art history books: St. Wolfgang and the Devil by Michael Pacher. I was growing up in a conservative Christian home; Satan was of great interest to me. What did he look like? Would I be able to recognize him, if he came after me? Article continues after advertisementI needn’t have worried. The Devil in the painting was an emaciated green lizard with curled fangs and sheep’s horns.
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Oct 2, 2024 | 
centerforfiction.org | Jamie Quatro
RegisterClear Thursday, 7:00 pm EDT - 8:15 pm EDTOctober 3, 2024 The Center for Fiction& LivestreamedThe Center for Fiction is pleased to welcome Jamie Quatro, dubbed by the New Yorker as the “fearless” author of I Want to Show You More and Fire Sermon, in conversation with Sloane Crosley (Grief Is for People, Cult Classic).
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Sep 13, 2024 | 
bookreporter.com | Jamie Quatro
Born in Georgia in 1911, Zebedee Armstrong worked most of his life picking cotton on the same farm where his father had done so before him. In the early 1970s, just a few years after the death of his wife, Armstrong received a vision of an angel sent from God to share the message of the coming end of days. From that point on, Armstrong began to create apocalypse calendars: these red and white expressions were painted on many of his possessions in the small house in which he lived.
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Sep 10, 2024 | 
nytimes.com | Jamie Quatro |Two-Step Devil
TWO-STEP DEVIL, by Jamie QuatroLookout Mountain, Ala., 2014. A 70-year-old man called the Prophet lives alone in a dilapidated cabin in the woods. A former welder and drinker with possible wet brain and lung cancer he is reluctant to treat, the Prophet grows and sells fruits and vegetables - potatoes, beans, peaches, squash - sometimes with a healing song. The Prophet's wife died of cancer years ago. His only son, a singer, has left him for Nashville.
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Sep 2, 2024 | 
ajc.com | Leah Tyler |Jamie Quatro
Religion, art and the tribulations of the world come together in author Jamie Quatro’s innovative third book “Two-Step Devil,” a gripping tale that plays with form as much as point-of-view to deliver an enrapturing story. This blistering yet tender work of speculative fiction does not seek to condemn, but instead expands the conversation into the dark crevices where religious zealotry and mental health meet the perceptions of good and evil.
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Jul 26, 2024 | 
groveatlantic.com | Jamie Quatro |Rachael Richardson
By Jamie QuatroWhen I first saw Alex Merto’s design for Two-Step Devil—a cheeky goat’s face drawn in pencil, with paint-splash devil horns—I couldn’t tell if my instant gut-butterflies were a product of excitement or anxiety. I live in the South. The devil is suspect down here. Yesterday, at brunch with my family, I asked the server how many deviled eggs came out with the order. “Seven,” she said. “Weird, right? You’d think there’d be six.”The devil being on my mind of late, I made a joke.
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Dec 4, 2023 | 
theparisreview.org | Jamie Quatro
Mark
My first job was at a frozen yogurt shop called TCBY. This was 1987, in Tucson. The shop was on Speedway Boulevard, in a strip mall between two car washes—the first TCBY franchise in the city, though within a year there would be two more, plus a Greg’s FroYo and a Yogurt King. In employee training we learned that TCBY used to stand for This Can’t Be Yogurt, until I Can’t Believe It’s Yogurt sued. TCBY kept the acronym, claiming it now stood for The Country’s Best Yogurt, and carried on.
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Nov 14, 2023 | 
oxfordamerican.org | Peter Guralnick |John Lingan |Jamie Quatro |Kiese Laymon
GEORGIA ON MY MINDListeningThe Music of GeorgiaEditors’ NoteThere’s nobody like Blind Willie McTellby Peter GuralnickThe moony lyricism of Johnny Mercerby John LinganPondering the Indigo Girls, awaiting clarityby Jamie QuatroDA ART OF STORYTELLIN’ (A PREQUEL)OutKast’s Southern Stankby Kiese Laymon FABLES OF THE RECONSTRUCTIONInnovationGram Parsons’s prophetic Nudie suitby Elyssa EastThe Skillet Lickers’ pickin’ picnicby Greg ReishMC Shy D, an original ATLienby Will StephensonThomas A.
