Maureen Corrigan
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.
Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014. Corrigan is represented by Trinity Ray at The Tuesday Lecture Agency: trinity@tuesdayagency.com
Corrigan's literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! was published in 2005. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post's Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges' panel of the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize.
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A graduate student is teaching four courses while also trying to finish a dissertation. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Christine Smallwood's new novel one of the wittiest she's read in a long time. -
Cell phones, social media and smart houses feature prominently in John Lanchester's Reality and Other Stories. A year into the pandemic, the collection speaks eerily to our tech-dependent lives. -
Narrated by a robotic "artificial friend," Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel offers readers a deeper understanding of what it means to be human. -
Ellen McGarrahan was a young reporter for The Miami Herald, when she witnessed an execution that went horribly wrong. She revisits the case of Jesse Tafero in an intense new true crime book. -
Vendela Vida's novel centers on four 13-year-old girls who are perched on the edge of adulthood — and the recognition that some things they do or say now will change who they become as adults. -
Chang-rae Lee's new novel follows an aimless college student on his year overseas, taking readers from the New Jersey suburbs into some of the more luxurious reaches of Asian megacities. -
When Nadia Owusu was 4 years old, her Armenian American mother disappeared from her life. When she was 13, her Ghanaian father died. Owusu reflects the losses and her biracial identity in her memoir. -
Critic Maureen Corrigan has been describing Anna North's new novel to friends as "The Handmaid's Tale meets Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid." It's a glib tagline, but not without justification. -
Smith's 1948 follow-up to A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a forgotten novel that deserves to be exhumed. The things that made it an awkward response to its predecessor make it more intriguing now.
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Sealed into our little Zoom boxes, masked when we're in contact with others, it's easy to feel separated from the world during the pandemic. These 10 books can help break through the solitude.
