Books & Literature

Raven Leilani's novel centers on a young woman with a free-range libido who dreams of being a painter. Luster is a crackling debut about sex, art and the inescapable workings of race.

Maureen Corrigan reviews two new books that could easily be overlooked, but shouldn't be.

Natasha Trethewey has written before about the murder of her mother decades ago by her step father. She got a new window on her mother's life after getting access to the police files about her mother's case. Her new memoir is 'Memorial Drive.'

Mike Birbiglia explores his ambivalence about parenthood in the new book, The New One: Painfully True Stories from a Reluctant Dad. Stein collaborated on the memoir, contributing her side of the story through poems, published under the name J. Hope Stein.

Mary Trump's father, Fred Trump Jr., was Donald Trump's older brother and the black sheep of the family. After Fred Jr.'s death in 1981, Mary Trump's grandfather changed his will to exclude Mary and her brother. She writes about her family's tangled history in the new memoir, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World's Most Dangerous Man.

Smith began Intimations: Six Essays at the onset of the pandemic and finished it shortly after George Floyd's killing. Although only 100 pages, there's something worth quoting on virtually every page.

Emma Donoghue's new novel "The Pull of the Stars," is set in a maternity ward in 1918 in Dublin, a city hollowed out by the flu, World War I and the 1916 Irish Uprising.

Maureen Corrigan says the new novel 'Want' is sharp about economic fragility and just how close to the edge people are — even with the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs and good educations.

A poet, novelist and screenwriter, Hayes' name largely fell from view following his death in 1985. Now, with the re-issue of three of his novels, his reputation has been making a comeback.

Ewing's 1919 looks back on a century-old riot in Chicago, set off after a black teen drowned while being stoned by white people. She says the systemic racism that plagued the U.S. then still exists.

Dew, who died May 22, wrote intimately about family relationships in both fiction and nonfiction. She spoke to Terry Gross in 1994 about The Family Heart, her memoir about learning her son was gay.

The Vanishing Half tells the multi-generational story of the Vignes sisters, Desiree and Stella, two very pretty identical twins who grow up in the small town of Mallard, La. It's a town where all the residents are light-skinned African Americans.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews a new comic novel about a road trip.

"Imagine what Philip Roth would've made of this."

Growing up in San Francisco in the '70s, Alia Volz's family ran a booming weed-laced brownie business. "I had this understanding of my family as an outlaw family from the very beginning," she says.

I was initially drawn to Phuc Tran's new memoir about growing up as the son of Vietnamese refugees because of the playfulness of its title: Sigh, Gone.

What does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood? That's the question LGBTQ activist Jennifer Finney Boylan set out to explore her new memoir, Good Boy: My Life in Seven Dogs.

Our book critic Maureen Corrigan has been thinking about the role books play in challenging times, and she has some recommendations for books that are ready to report for duty.

The Russian poet Joseph Brodsky once said that prison is a lack of space counterbalanced by a surplus of time. Our current lockdown can't be compared to being locked up, but with so much surplus time on our hands, many of us are eager for stories that will help us escape endless thoughts of COVID-19. Here are three that did that for me: Unorthodox, Baghdad Central, and Abigail.