Maureen Corrigan

Maureen Corrigan appears in the following:

'Grief Is for People' is an idiosyncratic reflection on friendship and loss

Tuesday, March 05, 2024

Sloane Crosley's memoir about a friend who died by suicide takes the form of a "traditional" elegy, but there's nothing traditional about Crosley's arresting observations on being engulfed by grief.

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In 'Cahokia Jazz,' alternate history mashes up with hardboiled noir

Thursday, February 15, 2024

Francis Spufford's novel imagines a 1920s city in which Native Americans still hold territory and political power, and the "color line" doesn't exist — until a grisly murder disrupts everything.

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A would-be 'Martyr!' searches for meaning in this wry debut novel

Wednesday, January 24, 2024

Kaveh Akbar's Martyr! is very much its own creation, but you might think of it as an Iranian American spin on John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces — wedded to Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch.

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'Prophet Song' is a beautifully-written, slow descent into fascism

Monday, January 01, 2024

Most of the characters in Paul Lynch's Booker Prize-winning novel don't want to believe that tyranny is taking shape before their eyes, even as power is cut off and democratic freedoms evaporate.

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Claire Keegan's 'stories of women and men' explore what goes wrong between them

Monday, November 13, 2023

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says her only frustration with Keegan's work is that she wants more of it. So she was happy to read her nuanced, three-story collection, So Late in the Day.

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Alice McDermott's 'Absolution' transports her signature characters to Vietnam

Monday, October 30, 2023

McDermott's latest novel, which centers on two American women who meet in Saigon in 1963, explores themes of religion, humility and insistent charitable intervention.

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'Blackouts' is an ingenious deathbed conversation between two friends

Monday, October 16, 2023

More than a decade after his debut, We the Animals, Justin Torres returns with a novel that centers on a deathbed conversation between two friends about the distortions and erasures of queer history.

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The dystopian suspense 'Land of Milk and Honey' satisfies all manner of appetites

Tuesday, September 26, 2023

Set in the near future, C Pam Zhang's atmospheric novel centers on a chef who takes a job at a tech entrepreneur's isolated compound after smog kills most of Earth's plant and animal species.

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Lauren Groff's survivalist novel 'The Vaster Wilds' will test your endurance, too

Thursday, September 21, 2023

An impoverished servant girl escapes the fledgling Jamestown colony during the winter of 1609–1610 in a historical saga that takes its inspiration from Robinson Crusoe.

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Descendants of a famous poet wrestle with his vexed legacy in 'The Wren, The Wren'

Thursday, September 07, 2023

An acclaimed Irish poet deserts his sick wife and two young daughters. Anne Enright's new novel centers on the way that betrayal reverberates throughout the next generations.

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James McBride's 'Heaven & Earth' is an all-American mix of prejudice and hope

Monday, August 14, 2023

Set in a neighborhood where Blacks and immigrant Jews have lived next to each other for decades, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels critic Maureen Corrigan has read this year.

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The secret to Barbie's enduring appeal? She can fend for herself

Tuesday, July 25, 2023

Maureen Corrigan recalls playing with the iconic doll on the sidewalk in Queens in the 1960s. She says Barbie didn't teach girls to be of service; she taught the giddy pleasures of a seeming autonomy.

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Dive in: 'Do Tell' and 'The Stolen Coast' are perfect summer escapes

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Lindsay Lynch's luscious debut, Do Tell, is set in Hollywood's Golden Age. Dwyer Murphy's The Stolen Coast is a moody tale of a lawyer who makes his money ferrying people on the run into new lives.

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A lost world comes alive in 'Through the Groves,' a memoir of pre-Disney Florida

Wednesday, July 12, 2023

Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Anne Hull grew up in the rural interior of Central Florida during the 1960s and '70s. Her memoir evokes a land of perfect citrus, and the cruel costs of its harvest.

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Hop in: Richard Ford and Lorrie Moore offer unforgettable summer road trips

Tuesday, June 27, 2023

Ford brings his Frank Bascombe saga to an end in Be Mine, while Moore weaves together a fragmentary Civil War plot with an off-kilter vision of the afterlife in I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home.

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Two new novels illustrate just how hard it is to find a foothold in America

Wednesday, June 21, 2023

Brandon Taylor's The Late Americans is a sexually-explicit, cynical novel about young people striving. Such Kindness, by Andre Dubus III, grapples with injury, addiction, masculinity and loneliness.

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Two summer suspense novels delight in overturning the 'woman-in-trouble' plot

Wednesday, June 07, 2023

Megan Abbott's Beware the Woman centers on a pregnant newlywed who finds herself isolated in her husband's family cottage. Katie Williams' My Murder is told from the perspective of a murdered woman.

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Luis Alberto Urrea pays tribute to WWII's forgotten volunteers — including his mother

Monday, May 22, 2023

The author's mother was a Red Cross volunteer assigned to Patton's 3rd Army — she was with the troops who helped liberate Buchenwald. Urrea's new woman-centered wartime novel is Good Night, Irene.

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When art you love was made by 'Monsters': A critic lays out the 'Fan's Dilemma'

Wednesday, May 10, 2023

Do geniuses get a "hall pass" for their behavior? Or, do we "cancel" the art of artists who've done "monstrous" things? That's the question Claire Dederer tackles in her new book.

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In 1984, Margaret Thatcher was nearly assassinated — a new book asks, what if?

Monday, April 17, 2023

The IRA planted the bomb at the Grand Hotel, in the seaside resort of Brighton, targeting the British prime minister. There Will Be Fire, by journalist Rory Carroll, reads like a political thriller.

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