Maureen Corrigan is a book critic for Fresh Air.
Recent Stories
It's been nine years since Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible, has released a new novel — but is The Lacuna worth the wait? Critic Maureen Corrigan says this personalized perspective on the Red Scare in Mexico reflects the hidden meaning of the book's title: vacancy.
Jane Gardam has spent her long career writing dry, honest books about British life. Her new novel, The Man in the Wooden Hat, showcases the regrets of a woman never quite sure that marrying her husband was the right choice. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Gardam the best British writer you've never heard of.
If a comic book about surviving middle school doesn't sound like a must read to you, think again. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that Jeff Kinney's Dog Days — the latest in his Diary of a Wimpy Kid series — hits home with any crowd.
Set in various fantastic and creepy landscapes, Dan Chaon's latest book, Await Your Reply, weaves together three separate narratives in what reviewer Maureen Corrigan calls a "spinning nebula of a novel."
Morris Dickstein's dazzling new cultural history of the Great Depression, called Dancing in the Dark, is one of those "everything but the kitchen sink" kind of books — that really works.
Lorrie Moore puts her penetrating prose and sly observations to work in her latest novel, A Gate at the Stairs. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls the book "a literary cyclone."
Richard Russo turns a satiric eye toward matrimony and middle age in his new novel, That Old Cape Magic. Book critic Maureen Corrigan calls the book a "glistening ... chambered nautilus of a novel."
Jennifer Weiner's latest novel, Best Friends Forever, is much sharper than its dopey title would suggest. With a nod to Thelma and Louise, Weiner's Addie and Valerie rekindle a friendship that fizzled decades ago.
When Henry Ford bought up a Connecticut-sized chunk of land in the Amazon River basin in 1927, he wasn't just planning to build his own vertically-integrated rubber plantation — he also envisioned the small-town America of his youth, reborn in the jungle.
Gertrude Ederle was the first woman to swim the English Channel, finishing faster than any of the five men who had done it before. Young Woman and the Sea shows how Ederle's fame grew, then evaporated.
In time for the 110th anniversary of the author's birth, Ernest Hemingway's posthumous memoir, A Moveable Feast, has been restored — or rather, as Maureen Corrigan would have it, "remixed."
Short but not so sweet, Kate Walbert's melancholy new novel, A Short History of Women, follows five generations of women. Maureen Corrigan has a review.
What can old issues of Publishers Weekly tell us about reading habits in dire economic times? Maureen Corrigan cracks open some of the magazine's 1933 issues and learns that readers today aren't so different from our Depression-era brethren.
In Chandler Burr's You or Someone Like You, the wife of a powerful Hollywood executive unexpectedly finds herself at the helm of a popular book group. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls it a "smart novel" that offers "a very tough reflection on the idea of 'group-ness' itself"
Mark Kurlansky's The Food of a Younger Land presents a marvelous history of America's gastronomical oddities and antiques; a remembrance of tastes and customs past. Maureen Corrigan has a review.
