Maureen Corrigan
Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR's Fresh Air, is The Nicky and Jamie Grant Distinguished Professor of the Practice in Literary Criticism at Georgetown University. She is an associate editor of and contributor to Mystery and Suspense Writers (Scribner) and the winner of the 1999 Edgar Award for Criticism, presented by the Mystery Writers of America. In 2019, Corrigan was awarded the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing by the National Book Critics Circle.
Corrigan served as a juror for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. Her book So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came To Be and Why It Endures was published by Little, Brown in September 2014. Corrigan is represented by Trinity Ray at The Tuesday Lecture Agency: trinity@tuesdayagency.com
Corrigan's literary memoir, Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading! was published in 2005. Corrigan is also a reviewer and columnist for The Washington Post's Book World. In addition to serving on the advisory panel of The American Heritage Dictionary, she has chaired the Mystery and Suspense judges' panel of the Los Angeles TimesBook Prize.
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Fresh Air's book critic says 2023 was an outstanding year for reading. Corrigan shares 10 of her favorite titles – a wide-ranging list of fiction and nonfiction. -
A critic becomes an amateur detective in order to avoid becoming a murder suspect in Alexis Soloski's Here in the Dark. In The Mystery Guest, by Nita Prose, a hotel's maid has to clean up a real mess.
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Book critic Maureen Corrigan says her only frustration with Keegan's work is that she wants more of it. So she was happy to read her nuanced, three-story collection, So Late in the Day.
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McDermott's latest novel, which centers on two American women who meet in Saigon in 1963, explores themes of religion, humility and insistent charitable intervention.
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More than a decade after his debut, We the Animals, Justin Torres returns with a novel that centers on a deathbed conversation between two friends about the distortions and erasures of queer history.
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Set in the near future, C Pam Zhang's atmospheric novel centers on a chef who takes a job at a tech entrepreneur's isolated compound after smog kills most of Earth's plant and animal species.
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An impoverished servant girl escapes the fledgling Jamestown colony during the winter of 1609–1610 in a historical saga that takes its inspiration from Robinson Crusoe.
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An acclaimed Irish poet deserts his sick wife and two young daughters. Anne Enright's new novel centers on the way that betrayal reverberates throughout the next generations.
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Set in a neighborhood where Blacks and immigrant Jews have lived next to each other for decades, The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store is one of the best novels critic Maureen Corrigan has read this year.
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Maureen Corrigan recalls playing with the iconic doll on the sidewalk in Queens in the 1960s. She says Barbie didn't teach girls to be of service; she taught the giddy pleasures of a seeming autonomy.
