Fresh Air: Book Reviews
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Coming To 'Americanah': Two Tales Of Immigrant Experience
The new book from Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is a knockout of a novel about immigration that transcends genre. It's everything from a coming-of-age novel to a romance to a comic novel of social manners to an up-to-the-minute meditation on race.
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Postgraduate Post-Mortem In A Smart, Literary Mystery
Full of sex, intrigue and clues based on Victorian poetry, Elanor Dymott's Every Contact Leaves a Trace is a literary mystery about a murder at Oxford University. This tale of a clueless husband who discovers his wife's true nature too late reminds critic Maureen Corrigan a little of Gone Girl.
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Godwin's 'Flora': A Tale Of Remorse That Creeps Under...
The latest novel from three-time National Book Award finalist Gail Godwin takes inspiration from Henry James' The Turn of the Screw. Both stories take place in isolated old houses, and both revolve around mental contests between a governess character and her young charge.
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'Equilaterial': Martians, Oil And A Hole In The Desert
Ken Kalfus' new novel about an astronomer obsessed with attracting the attention of Martians appears at first to be an homage to the scientific romances of H.G. Wells and the lost-world sagas of H. Rider Haggard. As the novel develops, however, its unique social commentaries emerge.
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Beauty Marks: Patricia Volk's Lessons In Womanhood
In her new memoir, Shocked, Volk examines the two women who had a lasting impact on her as she began to parse who she was as a woman: her beautiful, critical mother, Audrey Morgen Volk; and the famous — and unconventional — haute couture designer Elsa Schiaparelli.
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'Burgess Boys' Family Saga Explores The Authenticity Of...
Elizabeth Strout is best known for her short story collection Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2009. Her new book is a novel, and critic Maureen Corrigan says it's a different type of winner.
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The Apathy In 'A Thousand Pardons' Is Hard To Forgive
The rich and good-looking get a taste of life among the 99 percent in Jonathan Dee's novels. In A Thousand Pardons, his protagonist, Helen Armstead, finds a secret talent for getting powerful men to apologize after her marriage falls apart and she is forced to enter the working world.
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'Lean In': Not Much Of A Manifesto, But Still A Win For...
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has drawn a lot of attention with her "sort of a feminist manifesto" Lean In. Critic Maureen Corrigan finds that much of the book is bland, but toward the end, Sandberg's intellectual charisma breaks through.
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A Fiendish Fly Recalls Kafka In 'Jacob's Folly'
The main character in Rebecca Miller's new novel is a pest with a past, and his gnat-like status offers him one great advantage: Those convex eyes allow him to see fully into the hearts of humans, specifically two other characters whose paths intersect with his.
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Dorothea Lange's 'Migrant Mother' Inspires The Story Of...
Marisa Silver's new novel imagines the meeting of a Depression-era photographer and her now-iconic subject. Giving the characters different names but similar stories to their real-life counterparts, Silver tackles big questions about the morality of art.
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Karen Russell's 'Vampires' Deserve The Raves
The author of Swamplandia! has a new collection of short stories called Vampires in the Lemon Grove. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the stories are daring and devastating, and with them Russell establishes herself as one of the great American writers of our young century.
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A Soured Student-Teacher Friendship Threatens...
In a new memoir, James Lasdun describes how a former-student-turned-friend stalked and slandered him online. Give Me Everything You Have is a meditation on what it means to control your reputation on the Internet — and the book is Lasdun's attempt to fight back.
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Jane Austen's 'Pride And Prejudice' At 200
As the classic novel celebrates its bicentennial, Paula Byrne's The Real Jane Austen examines some of the key objects in Austen's life and how they reveal a much more cosmopolitan awareness of the world than is commonly credited to her.
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How A 'Madwoman' Upended A Literary Boys Club
The National Book Critics Circle has announced that two feminist literary scholars, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, will receive a lifetime achievement award. Critic Maureen Corrigan says their groundbreaking 1979 book, The Madwoman in the Attic, changed the way we read.
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George Saunders Lives Up To The Hype
At the beginning of January, the cover story of The New York Times Magazine declared: "George Saunders Has Written The Best Book You'll Read This Year." The stories in the author's latest collection, The Tenth of December, prove that The Times may well be right.
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'A Grain Of Truth' About Memory And Modern Poland
A new mystery by novelist Zygmunt Miloszewski explores Poland's relationship to its anti-Semitic past. Teodor Szacki, the likably washed-up hero, must sprint all over town interrogating suspects, including so-called Polish "patriots" — extremists who bombard him with their anti-Semitic rants.
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10 Books To Help You Recover From A Tense 2012
2012 was a very jittery year — what with the presidential election, extreme weather events and the looming "fiscal cliff." Fresh Air critic Maureen Corrigan found that her favorite fiction and nonfiction this year directly confronted the atmospheric uncertainty of the age.
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At Home With Dickens And Lousia May Alcott
Two new biographical studies that read like novels explore the familial relationships that shaped two of the 19th century's most beloved authors. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls Great Expectations: The Sons And Daughters Of Charles Dickens "a Gothic nightmare" and Marmee & Louisa "a romance."
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Hungry Hearts And Family Matters In 'Middlesteins'
Jami Attenberg's black comedy about the fallout of one woman's food addiction is a tough but affecting story about family members putting up with each other. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel's fragmented narration and jumpy timeline add to its emotional punch.
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Ian McEwan's 'Sweet Tooth' Leaves A Sour Taste
The novelist has won the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Award. His latest novel, however, earns the ire of critic Maureen Corrigan, who usually numbers among McEwan's fans but finds herself dismayed by this book's attitudes toward women.
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Caring For Mom, Dreaming Of 'Elsewhere'
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Richard Russo began looking out for his mother early in life. In his new memoir, Elsewhere, Russo writes not only of his mother, but of the vanished world that shaped her. Critic Maureen Corrigan calls the book "gorgeously nuanced."
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'Master' Jefferson: Defender Of Liberty, Then Slavery
In Master of the Mountain, historian Henry Wiencek uses an explosive interpretation of evidence to show how, by the 1780s, Founding Father and slave owner Thomas Jefferson had gone from championing equality to rationalizing an abomination.
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'May We Be Forgiven': A Story Of Second Chances
In A.M. Homes' suburbia, yawning sinkholes will suddenly open up in front lawns, swallowing cliched plotlines and opening portals to other dimensions. In her latest novel, she serves up an old-fashioned American story that's more Norman Bates than Norman Rockwell.
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Roving Eyes, Wandering Hands In 'How You Lose Her'
Junot Diaz's electric new collection of short stories centers around Yunior, a macho yet mournful Dominican-American man. In these stories about love, lust and infidelity, a good man is hard to find — and when he is found, he's always in bed with someone else.
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A Lifetime Of Love In 'My Husband And My Wives'
Charles Rowan Beye has been married three times — to two women and a man. Now, over age 80, he looks back on his life and asks, "What was that all about?" Critic Maureen Corrigan says Beye's memoir, subtitled "A Gay Man's Odyssey," is a complex, poignant addition to the sexual canon.
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'Life Of Objects' Tells A Cautionary WWII Fairy Tale
Susanna Moore tells the saga of an ambitious girl, a family's artistic fortune and a world at war. Young heroine Beatrice Palmer is whisked off to Berlin where she is put to work packing up priceless artwork in a wealthy family's mansion.
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'The Scientists': A Father's Lie And A Family's Legacy
Marco Roth grew up on New York's Upper West Side in the 1980s, where a liberal Jewish culture infused with European tastes was breathing its last gasps. In his memoir, Roth describes how he learned — years after his father died from AIDS — that his father was probably gay.
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Was Zadie Smith's Novel 'NW' Worth The Wait?
Zadie Smith wrote her last novel On Beauty seven years ago — a long time in the anxious world of publishing. Her new novel NW was released in the U.S. on Monday. Critic Maureen Corrigan asks: Was it worth the wait?
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In 'The Brontes,' Details Of A Family's Strange World
Juliet Barker has released a new edition of her landmark 1994 biography, The Brontes. Critic Maureen Corrigan says that even the 136 pages of footnotes are "thrilling," as readers are taken "deeper into the everyday realities" of the Brontes' "strange world."
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'Dreamland': Open Your Eyes To The Science Of Sleep
Most people's after-midnight mishaps are nothing compared with what David K. Randall describes in his new book. From people committing murder while supposedly sleepwalking, to what sleep was like in medieval times, Dreamland provides a lively overview of the world's most popular nocturnal pastime.
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A Moody Tale Of Murder In A 'Broken' Dublin Suburb
Tana French's latest novel follows Mick "Scorcher" Kennedy, a police detective with a rage for order, as he investigates a young family's murder in a suburban Dublin development gone bust. Critic Maureen Corrigan says Broken Harbor is as much social criticism as it is whodunit.
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A Little Advice On 'How To Be A Woman'
In her essays, British columnist Caitlin Moran picks up funny feminism where Nora Ephron left off. She takes a fresh approach to hit topics from the past 40 or so years of feminist writing: sexuality, marriage, division of housework, female body fat, abortion and sexism in the workplace.
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'A Door In The Ocean' Leads To Dark Depths
In his new memoir, David McGlynn describes how his teenage years were disrupted by violence. McGlynn was a swimmer who turned to evangelical Christianity in college. A Door in the Ocean is a compelling coming-of-age story marked by random tragedy and biblical tracts, church coffee and chlorine.
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'The Age Of Miracles' Considers Earth's Fragility
In Karen Thompson Walker's first book, climate change makes the Earth's rotation grow more and more sluggish, but this melancholy page-turner is more than just a disaster plot.
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'Beautiful Ruins,' Both Human And Architectural
Jess Walter's latest novel spans decades and traverses the Atlantic to create a kaleidoscopic collection of "beautiful ruins." Characters include a hotelier, a young script reader and real-life movie star Richard Burton. NPR's Maureen Corrigan says the book is a "literary miracle."
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Book Party For One: A Loner's Summer Survival Guide
Summer is a trying time for introverts, what with the barbecues and the graduations and the picnics by the pool. If you'd always choose a good book over a good party, critic Maureen Corrigan has a list for you.
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Brit Wit Meets Manor Mystery In 'Uninvited Guests'
A dark and stormy night, an isolated manor house and a knock at the door all play a part in Sadie Jones' delicious romp of a novel. Set in Edwardian England, it tracks a noble but cash-strapped family whose lavish dinner plans go awry when they're asked to shelter a crowd of refugees.
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'Right-Hand': A Lush Prequel To 'Mason's Retreat'
In The Right-Hand Shore, Christopher Tilghman returns to the racially charged landscape and the crumbling plantations of his book Mason's Retreat. Fresh Air critic Maureen Corrigan calls the prequel "the real deal."
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'The Newlyweds': A Match Made Online
As accusations of sexism ricochet through the book industry, Nell Freudenberger continues to craft wonderful literary fiction, writes Maureen Corrigan. Freudenberger's latest novel, The Newlyweds, tells the story of an Internet-arranged, cross-continental marriage.
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Lillian Hellman: A 'Difficult,' Vilified Woman
A fierce playwright, a fiery socialist and a pioneering feminist, Lillian Hellman lived unapologetically. But today she's remembered as a fabulist and a rabble-rouser — if she's remembered at all. A new Hellman biography, A Difficult Woman, hopes to set the record straight.
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'Present': For Nadine Gordimer, Politics Hit Home
Nadine Gordimer has always incorporated political themes into her novels, but her latest work turns its sights toward the domestic sphere. In No Time Like the Present, a South African activist couple struggles to find happiness in a world of their own making.
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Lionel Shriver's Not-So-'New Republic'
Publishers initially passed on Lionel Shriver's satire on terrorism, The New Republic. The manuscript languished in a drawer until now, but can a work written 13 years ago remain relevant today?
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Two Books That Delight In New York City's Dirt
If you want to know anything about America's greatest city, you've got to be willing to get grimy, says critic Maureen Corrigan. Two new books about New York — a novel and a narrative history — do more than put up with filth, they positively wallow in it.
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'Coral Glynn': The Art Of Repression
Peter Cameron's new novel about a young nurse is a consummate English country home novel. Put the kettle on and settle in — but don't get too comfortable: Cameron's writing is full of sharp angles and unanticipated swerves into the droll and the downright weird.
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China On The Court: NBA Meets The 'Brave Dragons'
A new book follows an American basketball veteran as he coaches a struggling Chinese pro basketball team. Pulitzer Prize winner Jim Yardley has a courtside seat from which to observe China's frantic capitalist expansion and its ambivalent fascination with all things American.
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More Than Melancholy: 'In-Flight' Stories Soar
Helen Simpson once said that when it comes to short stories, "Something's got to happen, but not too much." Her latest short story collection, In-Flight Entertainment, may seem bleak and mundane — with subjects like mortality, infidelity and climate change — but it's also bursting with British wit.
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Scrappy 'Girlchild' Forms A Girl Scout Troop Of One
Tupelo Hassman's debut novel stars Rory, a resilient, if ragged, life force raised in a Reno trailer park who adopts a tattered copy of The Girl Scout Handbook as her Bible. Rory endures sexual abuse, the death of loved ones, and everyday invisibility — all without playing for our sympathy.
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Fired And Foreclosed: Unemployment Lit
Unlike the Great Depression, our current recession hasn't yet produced much memorable literature, but book critic Maureen Corrigan says that situation, like the economy, seems to be changing.
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'An Available Man': Love After Loss
Hilma Wolitzer's finely observed comedy of manners follows the romantic misadventures of recently widowed 62-year-old Edward Schuyler as he re-enters the dating pool with a splash.
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'Hope': A Comic Novel About The Holocaust?
Shalom Auslander's Hope: A Tragedy takes on genocide, identity politics and Anne Frank (now elderly and squatting in a farmhouse in upstate New York) with grim humor and daring irreverence.
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'Diaries' Reveals New York Through The Ages
In New York Diaries, editor Teresa Carpenter presents 400 years of diary excerpts written by people who've lived in or just passed through one of the greatest cities in the world.
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A Quaint, Compelling 'Pilgrim' Tale In The New World
The year is 1622, and a tormented English Puritan strikes out for the Plymouth Plantation in Hugh Nissenson's moody, intelligent novel. Critic Maureen Corrigan says The Pilgrim is a work of straightforward historical fiction — of the sort that you don't see so much anymore.
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Life Without Plot In 'Leaving The Atocha Station'
Lerner captures the sense of everyday life with an unusual focus on thoughts rather than incident, betting on the premise that these thoughts are the events, rather than the stuff in between them.
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A Critic To Remember: Pauline Kael At The 'Movies'
American film critic Pauline Kael was a brash, exuberant female writer at a time when most of her colleagues were buttoned up — and male. The Age of Movies, a new collection of selected essays and movie reviews from Kael, showcases the gutsy and passionate style that made her a household name.
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The Sad Lesson Of 'Body Snatchers': People Change
Science-fiction writer Jack Finney would have turned 100 this month. Critic Maureen Corrigan says he had a knack for tapping into our shallowly buried psychological anxieties. At its core, Finney's Invasion of the Body Snatchers is about how our loved ones inevitably change — and it is as sad as it is scary.
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'Lost Memory Of Skin' Goes Where Most Fiction Won't
Russell Banks' latest is an uneven effort to excavate and redeem the dregs of modern society. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel — about porn addiction and sexual predators — is compelling in a low-grade, nightmarish sort of way.
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'Freedom': Franzen's Novel Earns High Praise
Why all the adulatory attention, critics ask, for Jonathan Franzen's latest domestic drama about marriage and family? Even though Franzen gets more praise for doing what many fine female writers do "backwards and in heels," critic Maureen Corrigan says Freedom has earned its accolades.
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'The Swerve': Ideas That Rooted The Renaissance
Stephen Greenblatt chronicles the unlikely discovery of Lucretius' poem "On the Nature of Things" — by a 15th-century Italian book hunter. The Swerve is a masterfully written meditation on the fragile inheritance of ideas.
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Could 'Submission' Be America's Sept. 11 Novel?
Reviewer Maureen Corrigan says Amy Waldman's debut novel might be the Sept. 11 novel — the one that finally does justice, artistically and historically, to the aftershocks of that day.
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Teens, Sex And Tech Tear A 'Beautiful Life' Apart
Helen Schulman tells the story of a New York family's fall from grace in This Beautiful Life. Critic Maureen Corrigan says the novel is a parent's nightmare — a cautionary tale about what happens when hormones meet the Internet.
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A Delightful Portrait Of The Screwball 'Family Fang'
In Kevin Wilson's first novel, husband-and-wife conceptual artists stage elaborate public acts of "choreographed spontaneity" — to the embarrassment of their children. Wilson's inventive energy makes The Family Fang a strange, wonderful and refreshing read in the summer heat.
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'Stone Arabia': The Cost Of Artistic Commitment
Nik Worth is a failed musician who painstakingly documents his life and non-existent career, leaving his sister to worry about practical things like paying his rent. Dana Spiotta's new novel investigates the long-term costs of an artist's passion.
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'Turn Of Mind': The Haunted House Is In Your Head
Dr. Jennifer White is a retired orthopedic surgeon diagnosed with dementia — who cannot remember whether or not she killed her friend. Alice LaPlante's debut novel is a fearless and compassionate investigation into the erosion of her main character's mind.
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How E.B. White Spun 'Charlotte's Web'
It all started one morning in 1949, when White discovered a beautiful web in his barn, glistening with dew. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims explores how White wrote his magical meditation on time, mortality and friendship — for children.
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'State Of Wonder' Deftly Twists, Turns Off The Map
Ann Patchett's new novel lives up to its name; critic Maureen Corrigan's one-word review: "Wow." Patchett masterfully weaves her story through uncharted geographic and literary territory, all the while unraveling a story about the awful price of love and the terror of its inevitable loss.
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'Guilty Passion' Leads A Housewife To Homicide
Ron Hansen's latest novel, A Wild Surge of Guilty Passion, fictionalizes an infamous crime of sexual transgression. In 1927, Ruth Snyder killed her husband, Albert, after falling in love with a lingerie salesman. Hansen's sexy fictionalization of the real-life murder sizzles with the spirit of the Roaring '20s.
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Summer Reads To Transport You Back In Time
When book critic Maureen Corrigan was a kid, her family would pile into the car for trips to sites of historical interest. For Corrigan, summer has always been the season for traveling back to a bygone age — either by hitting the road or hitting the books.
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'The Sentimentalists': Submerged Emotions Surface
Johanna Skibsrud's award-winning debut novel about an alcoholic father's relationship with his adult daughters was written for a master's thesis at Concordia University. Book critic Maureen Corrigan says the language of the story settles deep into a reader's consciousness.
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'Big Girl Small': Humiliation, High School Style
Rachel DeWoskin's novel follows a gutsy 16-year-old girl navigating her way at a new performing arts high school. The book is a distinctive addition to the already packed library of coming-of-age stories.
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WWI: A Moral Contest Between Pacifists And Soldiers
Adam Hochschild's pensive narrative history, To End All Wars, focuses on those who fought — and also on those who refused. Hochschild is a master at chronicling how prevailing cultural opinion is formed and, less frequently, how it's challenged.
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An Old Romance Blooms Anew In 'Love Of My Youth'
In Mary Gordon's luscious, wistful new novel, two former lovers meet in Rome after not having seen each other for almost 40 years. Book critic Maureen Corrigan praises the book's "undeniable appeal."
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'Please Look After Mom': A Guilt Trip To The Big City
A blockbuster Korean novel has just been translated into English, in which a mother from the country goes missing in Seoul. Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan says the book delves deeply into traditional values, putting the mother's melancholy squarely on the shoulders of her grown (unappreciative) children.
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The Joy Of The Mundane In 'Emily, Alone'
In his new novel, Emily, Alone, Stewart O'Nan explores the topics of widowhood and old age — but the book never feels stale, says Fresh Air's Maureen Corrigan. Instead, it is a charming, quiet meditation on getting older.
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Anne Roiphe's 1950s Feminism In 'Art And Madness'
In Art and Madness, her memoir of the literary 1950s, writer Anne Roiphe describes going into labor by herself in a snowdrift, unable to wake her sleeping playwright husband. Over the years, she learns her own power, charting her course through feminism and a life in art.
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In 'Pym,' A Comic Glimpse Into Poe's Racial Politics
In his new book, Pym, fiction writer Mat Johnson plays with the premise of Edgar Allan Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Poe's novel was a "master text of anxious white fright," says Maureen Corrigan, and Johnson's clever book shines new light on the material.
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'I Think I Love You,' David Cassidy
Allison Pearson follows up I Don't Know How She Does It with I Think I Love You, a screwball comic novel about the lengths a girl will go to for her teen idol.
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Tiger Mothers: Raising Children The Chinese Way
Amy Chua, a professor of law at Yale, has written her first memoir about raising children the "Chinese way" -- with strict rules and expectations. Maureen Corrigan predicts the book will be "a book club and parenting blog phenomenon."
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William Trevor: A Short-Story Master's Life Work
William Trevor has been writing for more than 50 years and has won more literary awards than we have time to list. A volume of selected stories has recently been published, and Fresh Air's book critic Maureen Corrigan has an appreciation.
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