Maureen Corrigan

It's January, the stock market is shaky, and the Hollywood writer's strike is still dragging on, but Fresh Air's book critic says there's at least one piece of good news this month: Sue Miller has a new novel out.

Fresh Air's book critic reviews the latest novel from the author of Nine Parts of Desire.

Fresh Air's book critic reviews Judith Freeman's new biography The Long Embrace, the story of Philip Marlowe creator Raymond Chandler and his marriage to a woman 18 years older than him.

Fresh Air's book critic looks back at a busy year and selects the books that linger in memory as the calendar page turns.

Her favorite fiction:

Fresh Air's resident book critic surveys the shelves and offers a few recommendations for what the bibliomanes in your life might like to find inside the gift wrap. On her list are two examinations of the creative life, plus four titles from the 2X2 Series, a Feminist Press project pairing literature by men and women:
Arthur Conan Doyle: A Life in Letters, by Jon Lellenberg, Daniel Stashower and Charles Foley
The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World (25th anniversary edition), by Lewis Hyde

Writer Stewart O'Nan has nearly 20 works of fiction and nonfiction to his credit, but his name isn't too well known beyond a community of loyal readers and independent-bookstore prowlers.

But book critic Maureen Corrigan predicts that O'Nan's literary celebrity will grow in the wake of his latest book, Last Night at the Lobster. It's a little book, she says, that's making a big splash.

Norman Mailer's work combined sweeping cultural criticism, erudition and obscenity.

Mailer's 60-year career was full of depth and controversy. The novelist, who died Nov. 10, was often deliberately provocative, says book critic Maureen Corrigan.

And though he made perhaps his strongest impact as an essayist and journalist, Mailer wanted to be remembered as a novelist.

Culture critic Susan Faludi writes about the gender wars in America; her books Backlash and Stiffed, in particular, have sparked admiration and controversy.

Faludi's latest book, The Terror Dream, is already generating much the same critical reaction. It's an investigation of America's response to Sept. 11, 2001, in terms of the myths and stories our society — in particular, the media — grasped hold of for reassurance after that day's terrorist attacks.

Richard Russo's novel, Bridge of Sighs, is a story about unexceptional people in an unexceptional upstate New York town. But the novel, Maureen Corrigan says, is anything but unexceptional; it's pound-for-pound the best new fiction on shelves today. Russo won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Empire Falls, a story about the relationships between people in a small town in Maine.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews “Run” (HarperCollins) the new novel by Ann Patchett.