Maureen Corrigan

Book critic Maureen Corrigan has been reading some newly reprinted novels from the Harlem Renaissance. She says these novels about American racism hardly feel dated at all.

Leila Slimani's novel, which has just been translated from the French, is inspired by a real life horror: the 2012 murder of two children in New York City by their nanny.

Denis Johnson's posthumous short story collection, The Largesse of the Sea Maiden, is full of last calls to his readers signaling, "Hurry up please, it's time."

Book critic Maureen Corrigan lists her Best Books of 2002:

Maureen says these books zing off in all directions: They're fresh, unruly and dismissive of the canned and contrived.

In the winter of 1949, a group of judges — including poets T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell — met to decide the winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize for the best book of poetry published in the United States the previous year. They gave the prize to Ezra Pound for his collection The Pisan Cantos. Then all hell broke loose.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says Louise Erdrich's new novel is something to celebrate.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new fiction books by two people better known for their work in Hollywood and on TV.

Nicknames like a real "peasouper" or a "London Particular" make the quintessential foggy day in London Town sound so quaint — an impression that's been intensified in art and literature.

Fifteen writers riff on various wild conspiracy theories generated about President Obama over the years. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the sly short stories in The Obama Inheritance pack a punch.