Books & Literature

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the debut novel by Dana Chapnick who spent most of her career on the editorial side of professional sports, including ESPN The Magazine. Maureen says Chapnick's deep knowledge of sports served her well in writing this novel.

Sigrid Nunez's National Book Award-winning novel is narrated by a woman grieving the suicide of her longtime friend and former writing professor, whom she slept with once.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN reviews the book which was on several prominent lists of "best books" of 2018 in Great Britian.

My taste doesn't naturally gravitate toward feminist dystopian fiction, but such stories are ubiquitous these days. Their influence seeps far beyond the classic novel and Hulu series of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, as well as the literary fiction it's inspired like Naomi Alderman's The Power and Leni Zumas' Red Clocks.

Oz, who died Dec. 28, co-founded Peace Now, a group that calls for negotiations with Palestinians and the creation of a Palestinian state. He spoke to Fresh Air in 1988, 1991 and 2004

Director Adam McKay aims to bring the powerful former vice president into the foreground in his new film, Vice, a dark comedy starring Christian Bale. The movie combines the work of investigative journalists with some speculation and comedy.

Many of the best of this year's books were graced with humor and distinguished by deep dives into American identity. It was also a very good year for deceased authors whose posthumously published books were so much more than mere postscripts to their careers. Rebecca Makkai's The Great Believers -- a sweeping story about the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and its long aftermath — is my pick for novel of the year.

Enter MeThe Great Internet Novel. Like the great white whale, it's rumored to be out there somewhere beyond the horizon. So far, the novelists who've been hailed as coming closest to writing it have done so in dystopian doorstoppers even longer than Herman Melville's Moby Dick; I'm thinking of The Circle, by Dave Eggers, and Book of Numbers, by Joshua Cohen, both of which tell sweeping cautionary tales about the wired life within Facebook-type cult compounds.

Ever since I was young, I've loved stories set in the far-flung reaches of the West's many empires — from the British Raj of E. M. Forster's A Passage to India to the surreal Vietnam of Apocalypse Now. And I still love them, though I now realize that they usually look at other cultures from the vantage point of outsiders, even intruders.

Gordon started out as a bebop prodigy in the '40s, and went on to star in the '86 film 'Round Midnight. Maxine Gordon captures her late husband's voice and music in the book Sophisticated Giant.

Take Meg Wolitzer's novel (now also a film) called The Wife, about a brazen case of literary ghostwriting, and cross it with Patricia Highsmith's classic Ripley stories, about a suave psychopath, and you've got something of the crooked charisma of John Boyne's new novel, A Ladder to the Sky.

Juan Gabriel Vásquez's novel, The Shape Of The Ruins, centers on the 1948 assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, the years of violence that followed and the conspiracy theories surrounding his death.

"Let the people see what they did to my boy." Those were the words spoken by Emmett Till's mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, after viewing the brutalized body of her son.

"Advice columnist" is not a role that is usually listed under Eleanor Roosevelt's long list of achievements, but for over 20 years she wrote a popular write-in column, first for Ladies Home Journal and then McCall's magazine.

Esi Edugyan's new novel, Washington Black, opens on wretched terrain: The year is 1830; the location is a sugar plantation in Barbados. Our narrator, an enslaved 11-year-old boy named George Washington Black — "Wash" for short — tells us that the old master has recently died.

Edugyan's latest novel, Washington Black, tells the story of a boy who escapes slavery and embarks on a voyage of scientific discovery. It has been shortlisted for the 2018 Man Booker Prize.

Musician and writer Leonard Cohen died in 2016, leaving behind many unpublished poems and lyrics. His son Adam Cohen discusses The Flame, a collection of some of Leonard's final works.

Book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN says Sarah Smarsh's new memoir Heartland is smart, nuanced and atmospheric.

Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita offers a compelling argument that Nabokov's 1955 novel had its roots in the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner — despite the author's claim to the contrary.