Maureen Corrigan

What I love most about Wilson's writing is that he'll start off with these goofy, almost sitcom-type contrived premises and from there create stories that knock you out with the force of their emotional truth. That distinctive sweet-tart flavor of Wilson's writing is triple-concentrated in his new short story collection, Baby, You're Gonna Be Mine.

R. O. Kwon's pensive debut novel, The Incendiaries, arrives just in time to stoke up "back-to-school" anxieties, especially those of entering college students and their nervous parents.

Megan Abbott's new novel centers on a two young women whose high school friendship has morphed into professional rivalry. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Give Me Your Hand a "spectacular thriller."

It's a rusty old bucket of a plot contrivance: throw a bunch of strangers together on a boat and roil the waters with a big storm or a white whale. But, in her latest novel, The Last Cruise, Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life yet to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' about a grieving woman trying to sleep long enough to relieve existential pain.

Deborah Levy opens her new memoir, The Cost of Living, by telling us one of those small stories whose size, like an ant or a virus, stands in inverse proportion to its power.

Richard Ratay book, Don't Make Me Pull Over!, is a very breezy history of the family road trip, which had its heyday, at least for some Americans, from the 1950s into the '70s. Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland, a writer barely anybody knows anymore. Garland's short stories are vivid and tough in their take on the realities of Midwestern farm life, especially for women.

Here's the thing about There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange: Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading.

In the relaxed days of summer, critic Maureen Corrigan reflexively reaches for a mystery. This year, she's settling in with The Dime, by Kathleen Kent, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware.

On the acknowledgments page of her new short story collection, Florida, Lauren Groff thanks Florida, where she lives and which she calls the "sunniest and strangest of states."