Maureen Corrigan

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new short story collections: The Winter Without Milk by Jane Avrich, and The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters.

Journeys, near and far, into the past and even into near space, are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up book critic Maureen Corrigan's early summer reading list.

In 2010, writer Rakesh Satyal won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Debut Fiction, for his novel "Blue Boy." His new novel is called "No One Can Pronounce My Name" which book critic Maureen Corrigan says is a misleading title.

Maureen Corrigan reviews 'Anything Is Possible,' the new book by Elizabeth Strout. Strout also wrote 'Olive Kitteridge' which won the 2009 Pulitzer Prize.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir by Dani Shapiro; it's her third memoir and it's about marriage. Her first two were best sellers.

Maureen Corrigan says 'One of the Boys', is a slim, deeply affecting and brutal story, about the fierce power of a father-son relationship.

Jean Hanff Korelitz's new novel is a smart, semi-satire about the reign of identity politics on college campuses today.

You might say that Heretics, a sprawling novel by celebrated Cuban writer Leonardo Padura, has been in the works since the early 1990s. It was back then that Padura began writing a series of books featuring an ex-police detective in Havana named Mario Conde. Funny and philosophical, Conde, like the sharpest of detectives, devotes more time to investigating the mysteries of his own society than he does to investigating crime.

Worlds collide in Waking Lions, a new novel by Israeli writer Ayelet Gundar-Goshen. Like Tom Wolfe, who used the device of a hit-and-run accident in The Bonfire of the Vanities as a means to violently "introduce" New Yorkers of different races and classes to each other, Gundar-Goshen also begins her story with a car ride gone haywire.

It's been almost 20 years since Barbara Ehrenreich published Fear of Falling, her brilliant book on the anxious "inner life" of the American middle class. The book's title, "fear of falling," has become a catchphrase to refer to the cosmic jitters that afflict anyone whose lifestyle and sense of identity can be wiped out by the loss of a job or a plunge in the stock market.