Maureen Corrigan

Maureen says these books zing off in all directions: They're fresh, unruly and dismissive of the canned and contrived.

In the winter of 1949, a group of judges — including poets T.S. Eliot and Robert Lowell — met to decide the winner of the prestigious Bollingen Prize for the best book of poetry published in the United States the previous year. They gave the prize to Ezra Pound for his collection The Pisan Cantos. Then all hell broke loose.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan says Louise Erdrich's new novel is something to celebrate.

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

Nicknames like a real "peasouper" or a "London Particular" make the quintessential foggy day in London Town sound so quaint — an impression that's been intensified in art and literature.

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.

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."

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?

"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.