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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Rachel Cusk's novel centers on a writer and mother recovering from divorce who teaches a summer course in Athens, Greece. The narrator has 10 conversations filled with holes, lies and self-deceptions.
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Megan Mayhew Bergman's stories about historical women are littered with bad-girl paraphernalia, like smashed-up motorcycles and morphine needles. In this collection, their lives are richly imagined. -
Leonard S. Bernstein — the writer, not the composer — once owned and managed a garment factory. In his first work of fiction the octogenarian crafts quaint parables about the comic futility of life.
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This year, Fresh Air's book critic rejects the tyranny of the decimal system and picks 12 titles published in 2014 — all with characters, scenes and voices that linger long past the last page. -
Ron Rash's best short stories from the past 20 years take you to a land apart psychologically and geographically. His writing is powerful, stripped down and very still. -
A digital publisher has released a bounty of Colwin's books: four novels, three short-story collections and a collection of cooking essays. Colwin, who died in 1992 at age 48, had an "elusive magic." -
In Richard Ford's brilliant collection of four short stories, protagonist Frank Bascombe returns to be "frank" about touchy topics. His awareness, particularly of mortality, is profound and hilarious. -
Hector Tobar had exclusive access to the 33 miners to report his new book detailing the claustrophobic horror they faced when they were trapped for 69 days in 2010. The result is a doozy. -
Heads tend to roll, figuratively and otherwise, in Mantel's writing. Critic Maureen Corrigan says this new short story collection — about grotesque characters in the modern world — is breathtaking.
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Brian Morton's novel features a 75-year-old woman — an icon of the Second Wave Women's Movement — who's a self-described "difficult woman." It's a witty, nuanced and ultimately moving novel.
