Books & Literature

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new fiction books by two people better known for their work in Hollywood and on TV.

The eight stories in Carmen Maria Machado's new collection feature women in extremis — physical danger, psychological meltdown, treacherous love or close encounters of a ghostly kind.

As someone who lives with obsessive-compulsive disorder, novelist John Green sometimes feels like his mind is spiraling uncontrollably.

Growing up as a first-generation Chinese-American in Northern California, novelist Amy Tan found herself pulled by two different notions of fate: Her mother was guided by beliefs in curses and luck, while her father, a Baptist minister, was guided by Christian faith.

Fifteen writers riff on various wild conspiracy theories generated about President Obama over the years. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the sly short stories in The Obama Inheritance pack a punch.

Author David Mendelsohn says having his 81-year-old father in the college seminar he was teaching on Homer's Odyssey led to an unexpected bonding.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Jennifer Egan's new book, 'Manhatten Beach' is a "big old-fashioned work of historical fiction."

Commentator Haroon Moghul on a ridiculous incident that helped lift him out of a depression.

Author Candice Millard argues that Churchill's battlefield coverage and daring escape from capture while serving as a correspondent for a British newspaper were turning points in his life.

David Litt is a former speechwriter and joke writer for President Obama. And he was the lead writer of four White House Correspondents Dinners, where the president did standup. He has a new memoir.

Danielle Allen's memoir centers on her cousin Michael, who was sentenced to a long prison term for carjacking when he was 15. Three years after his release, he was found shot to death in a parked car.

Two new books take unusual off-road approaches to the well-traveled subjects of divorce, death, the existence of the Divine, and dogs. Maureen Corrigan has a review.

The Burning Girl reads like an updated Gothic tale — in part, because it has so many of the traditional trappings of the genre (a decaying mansion, an evil guardian, ghosts) and, in part, because it's a novel about the friendship between two adolescent girls — and what life journey could be more Gothic than the passage through adolescence?

John le Carre who wrote the classic novels The Spy Who Came in From the Cold and Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy discusses his new spy novel, his own work as a spy for British Intelligence Services, and growing up with a father who was a pathological liar.

Though Mat Johnson's home wasn't flooded in the recent hurricane, the roads around him were. He had to pass these roads to make sure his elderly mother got the care she needed.

"Sour Heart" is the debut collection of stories by Jenny Zhang, and it's also the first book by Lena Dunham's publishing venture, Lenny Books, which she started to showcase young writers.

The 1950 film starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame was adapted from a lesser-known 1947 novel by Dorothy B. Hughes, who belongs in the crime-writing pantheon. The novel's just been re-released.

In the event of a zombie attack, author Max Brooks will be ready. His books The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z are fictional manifestations of his own fears and anxieties — and his impulse to overcome them by preparing for the worst.

Growing up in southwestern Virginia in recent decades, poet Molly McCully Brown often passed by a state institution in Amherst County that was once known as the "Virginia State Colony for Epileptics and Feebleminded."