Maureen Corrigan

Fresh Air's resident book critic selects her favorite reads from the year, including Patti Smith's moving memoir, a feminist slant on election season, a new history of labor unions.

Laura Hillenbrand -- the award-winning author of Seabiscuit -- has returned in fighting form with her latest nonfiction biography, Unbroken. The story of a pilot who survived a crash against all odds speaks to the indefatigable human spirit and our collective will to overcome.

Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air is an unsentimental meditation on the immigrant experience and the illusory idea of asylum. With lyrical prose, he reassesses the by-your-bootstraps mythology associated with American mobility.

Novelist Nicole Krauss artfully weaves disparate stories of love and loss into a devastating examination of the weight of memory on those left behind. Four narrators are connected by an antique desk separated from its original owner during the Holocaust.

Gustave Flaubert was an apostle of le mot juste — using exactly the right word. Lydia Davis elegantly translates his masterpiece, Madame Bovary, in the same spirit. Davis' words lure readers back into Emma Bovary's sexy, scandalous and tragic tale.

Rebecca Traister's incisive analysis of misogyny and gender roles in the 2008 election takes on Tina Fey's satire, "Iron my Shirt" T-shirts and Hillary Clinton's "Night of the Imaginary Tears."

Why all the adulatory attention, critics ask, for Jonathan Franzen's latest domestic drama about marriage and family? Even though Franzen gets more praise for doing what many fine female writers do "backwards and in heels," critic Maureen Corrigan says Freedom has earned its high praise.

The fictional Chinese detective Charlie Chan, who starred in a series of novels and movies between the 1920s and the 1950s, is often dismissed as a "Yellow Uncle Tom." But in the fascinating, sometimes maddening history Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang argues that Charlie is much more than a stereotype.

Helen Schulman tells the story of a New York family's fall from grace in This Beautiful Life. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel is a parent's nightmare -- a cautionary tale about what happens when hormones meet the Internet.

Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy has taken U.S. readers by storm. Not since the arrival of Ikea on these shores has Sweden made such an inroad into the American home and imagination. But critic Maureen Corrigan says the impressive "Ice Age" of Nordic mystery writing is well under way.