Maureen Corrigan

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!

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.