Books & Literature

Bernardine Evaristo's nuanced and entertaining Booker Prize-winning novel is told from the point of view of 12 British women of color — all just a few degrees of separation apart from each other.

My best books of the year list for 2019 is a mix of literary fiction and true crime and memoirs and essays. There are acclaimed authors here, as well as some brand new voices. The only thing that unites all these books is that, in my opinion, they are unputdownable.

Musician Leonard Cohen left behind many unpublished poems and lyrics when he died in 2016. Now his son Adam, who spoke to Fresh Air in 2018, has a new album of his dad's songs, Thanks for the Dance.

Journalist HEIDI BLAKE talks about investigating 14 suspected assassinations in Britain of exiled Russian oligarchs, security officials and others, targeted by Putin because they were critical of the Kremlin. Her new book is 'From Russia with Blood.'

Some writers search for their signature subjects; Susannah Cahalan had her subject thrust upon her. In 2009, she was a young reporter for the New York Post when, one day, she began feeling like she had the flu. Shortly thereafter, she was hospitalized, in the throes of full-blown hallucinations and paranoia.

As a black gay kid growing up in Texas in the 1990s, poet Saeed Jones remembers getting negative messages about his identity from every aspect of his life. It was around the time of Matthew Shepard's murder in Wyoming, and Jones felt alone and unsafe.

Allison Moorer's talks about coming to terms with the murder-suicide of her parents when she was 14, over thirty years ago, and how music helped.

Kevin Wilson's new book 'Nothing To See Here' about a set of twins who burst into flame when angry or afraid, is inspired in part by the intrusive fearful images he has had since childhood.

Perrotta's novel, Mrs. Fletcher, is now an HBO series. In 2017, he told Terry Gross that the book was inspired by the upheaval he experienced when his kids grew up and moved out of the house.

This past summer, I made time to catch up on a book I'd missed when it was published two years ago. Ever since, I've been telling friends, students and random strangers on a train that they must read Daniel Mendelsohn's memoir called An Odyssey. In it, he recalls teaching a seminar on Homer's Odyssey that his then 81-year-old father sat in on as an auditor.

The recent biopic Rocketman painted a Hollywood version of Elton John's life, but a new memoir, Me, comes straight from the artist himself. In it, he describes how, as a young man, he was determined to enter the music business, in spite of some misgivings about rock 'n' roll in his household. As he tells Fresh Air, "My dad, of course, hated it."

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the memoir 'How We Fight For Our Lives.'

Jack Goldsmith's new memoir centers on his investigation into his stepfather's involvement in the 1975 disappearance of the mob-connected labor leader Jimmy Hoffa.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new book about an Auden poem written after the start of World War 2.

Twins, singer-songwriters, and LGBTQ icons Tegan and Sara talk about their tumultuous high school years. It's the subject of their new memoir and a new recording.

Attica Locke's new novel centers on a black Texas ranger's effort to find the vanished son of a white supremacist. Heaven, My Home offers an unsettling American spin on a complicated crime story.

Tan France is the fashion expert on the Neflix series 'Queer Eye.' He grew up in a traditional Muslim family in England.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Margaret Atwood's sequel to 'The Handmaid's Tale.'

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans on Aug. 29, 2005, writer Sarah M. Broom was living in New York City, far away from her hometown and her family. In her extraordinary debut, a memoir called The Yellow House, Broom quotes from interviews with her mother and some of her 11 siblings to piece together the story of what happened when "the Water" roared into their neighborhood of New Orleans East and rose, up, up, up until it edged the tops of the houses.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reads the first book of essays by New York Times opinion writer Margaret Renkl.