Maureen Corrigan
Stories
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'Dizzy' author recounts a decade of being marooned by chronic illness
Rachel Weaver worked for the Forest Service in Alaska where she scaled towering trees to study nature. But in 2006, she woke up and felt like she was being spun in a hurricane. Her memoir is Dizzy.
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George Saunders' 'Vigil' is a brief and bumpy return to the Bardo
The Bardo is a Tibetan Buddhist idea of a suspended state between life and death. Saunders explored the concept in his 2017 novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, and circles back to it again in his new novel Vigil.
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'Even the Dead' wraps up John Banville's smart, moody mystery series
Originally published under a pseudonym, Banville's Quirke mystery series follows a troubled Dublin coroner who dwells in the basement morgue of a hospital.
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Feeling cooped up? Get out of town with this delightful literary road trip
In The Rest of Our Lives, the narrator drops his daughter off to college — then keeps on driving, leaving his marriage behind. Ben Markovits' novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize.
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Maureen Corrigan's 10 favorite books of 2025 — with plenty for nonfiction lovers
Fresh Air's book critic says her picks tilt a bit to nonfiction, but the novels that made the cut redress the imbalance by their sweep and intensity. Karen Russell's The Antidote was her favorite.
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A dying woman chooses friends over her husband in 'Some Bright Nowhere'
A woman with a terminal diagnosis asks her husband to leave the house in Ann Packer's new novel. Some Bright Nowhere is an absorbing book about end-of-life care and what the living owe the dying.
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Patti Smith's 'Bread of Angels' serves as both a sequel and a prequel to 'Just Kids'
Smith revisits her childhood and offers insights into her marriage in a new memoir. Bread of Angels offers an intimate, if imperfect, view of the visionary punk poet.
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Lily King's new novel constructs an erotically charged love triangle
Heart the Lover is both a prequel and a sequel to King's 2020 novel Lovers & Writers. It's a story about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself and realizing what you may have lost in the process.
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'The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny' is a terrific, tangled love story
This is an epic novel to be savored. At nearly 700 pages, this multi-character, multi-stranded story explores exile and displacement — not only from one's home, but also from one's own sense of self.
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4 lives are upended by an impulsive kiss in the epic novel 'Buckeye'
Patrick Ryan's novel focuses on two married couples and stretches from pre-WWII to the close of the 20th century, capturing both the sweep of history and the mundane particularity of everyday life.
