Maureen Corrigan

In her foreword to America Is in the Heart — Carlos Bulosan's classic 1946 novel about Filipinx and Mexican migrant workers on the West Coast — the Filipina American novelist Elaine Castillo asks readers, "Do you remember how old you were when you first read a book that had a character who looked and lived like you in it?"

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new book by Pulitzer-winning reporter Tony Horwitz who has covered wars and conflicts abroad but turned his attention to the conflicts in the U.S.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says it's never too early to get a jump on summer reading. She has two good books she wants to recommend.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new memoir about growing up wealthy on Philadelphia's Main Line. The author's grandmother was the inspiration for Katherine Hepburn's character in the film The Philadelphia Story.

Nell Freudenberger's gorgeous new novel tells the story of a middle-aged woman who receives messages sent from her college friend's cell phone — even after her friend has died.

Twenty-eight year old Sally Rooney is something of a wunderkind--an Irish writer whose first novel, 'Conversations with Friends' was published in 2017 and written in three months while she was in graduate school. Rooney's second novel 'Normal People' has just come out in the United States and was already designated the "Irish Novel of the Year" at the 2018 Irish Book Awards. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews it.

Laila Lalami's new novel is called The Other Americans and it's likely to jump start some timely book group discussions about the American experiment; specifically, about how different types of people feel less visible in this country because of their ethnicity, class, race or citizenship status.

One of the most joyous, true life, "on-the-road" adventures in literary history took place in the summer of 1927. It began in Mobile, Ala., when a young Langston Hughes, who was traveling in the South, stepped off the train from New Orleans and ran smack into Zora Neale Hurston.

What place in America could accomodate monsters, the Marx Brothers, and the artist who immortalized melting clocks? The answer, of course, is Hollywood and our book critic MAUREEN CORRIGAN has a review of two new books about forgotten stories from Hollywood's past.

It was a cold December night in 1972 in Belfast, Northern Ireland. A 38-year old widowed mother of 10 named Jean McConville was with her children in their apartment in the Divis Flats, a labyrinthine public housing project that one critic described a "slum in the sky."