Maureen Corrigan

I didn't know how much I needed a laugh until I began reading Stephen McCauley's new novel, My Ex-Life. This is the kind of witty, sparkling, sharp novel for which the verb "chortle" was invented.

Before Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and the other books that would make her reputation, she was studying anthropology. In 1927, Hurston's deep interest in black history and culture led her into what became one of the most remarkable conversations of her life. The book that resulted from that conversation has just been published for the first time.

This is one weird-but-true story. It's a story that leads readers from 19th century scientific expeditions into the jungles of Malaysia to the "feather fever" of the turn of the last century, when women's hats were be-plumed with ostriches and egrets. And it's a story that focuses on the feather-dependent Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and its present-day practitioners, many of whom lurk online in something called "The Feather Underground."

Patricia Hampl's new book is in part memoir and in part travelogue. It's titled The Art of the Wasted Day.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN reviews Meg Wolitzer's new novel about a young feminist who meets a feminist icon, and confronts their generational differences.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN reviews the new book by Jan Morris about the powerful Japanese battleship that became "the noblest of kamikaze weapons" by hurled itself against the invading American forces in 1945.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new books involving mysteries: one a biography of crime writer Agatha Christie; the other about The Golden State Killer.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Matt Young's debut memoir, about being a young Marine in Iraq.

Zadie Smith is justly celebrated for her chameleon-like gifts as a writer. In novels like White Teeth and On Beauty she's ventured deeply into the lives of a multi-racial assortment of immigrants to Great Britain and the United States. Her characters run the gamut from aspirational working-class kids, self-important academics, pensioners, young dancers and, to date, one Chinese-Jewish Londoner with a fixation on Golden Age Hollywood.

The classic coming-to-New-York story was a mashup of a few pleasurably predictable elements: a young person with dreams bigger than his or her bank account, a few roach-ridden apartments and crummy jobs, some eccentric friends and neighbors, and a couple of requisite hard knocks before ... success!