Books & Literature

Laura Shapiro's fascinating new book is called What She Ate, and it focuses on the lives of six women from different centuries and continents — all prominent to different degrees.

New Yorker staff writer Ariel Levy was five months pregnant when she went to Mongolia on assignment. Her doctor had cleared her for travel, and she was excited to pursue one last adventurous story before settling down with an infant.

It's a time-honored tradition for novelists to draw material from their own lives, and author Tom Perrotta is no exception. His 2004 book, Little Children, sprang from his experience as the parent of young kids. Three years later, he published The Abstinence Teacher, which was inspired, in part, by the junior-high and high-school sports his children played at the time.

Maureen Corrigan reviews a new biography of Chester Himes, who published his first novel in the 1940s and was hailed as a worthy member of an elite company of black intellectuals and writers like Ralph Ellison and Richard Wright. Now his literary legacy is largely forgotten. This new biography hopes to change that.

Linguist Geoff Nunberg considers the sentence by Jane Austen most quoted, and most misunderstood.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new books to help lighten your mood: The Last Laugh and Who is Rich?

In Lawrence Osborne's new novel Beautiful Animals, two entitled girls vacationing on a chic Greek island get involved with a mysterious stranger - with wholly unexpected results. Critic John Powers says, if you haven't read Osborne, this is a great place to start.

Sharon Horgan co-created and co-stars in the Amazon comedy series Catastrophe, playing one half of a couple making their way through parenthood, marriage and their careers.

Nick Laird is an award winning Northern Irish novelist and poet whose witty and politically informed writing is better known in Europe than America. Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews his new novel "Modern Gods."

On his first day in the seventh grade, Sherman Alexie opened up his school-assigned math book and found his mother's maiden name written in it. "I was looking at a 30-year-old math book," he says — and that was the moment he knew that he needed to leave his home.

Roxane Gay has finally written the book that she "wanted to write the least."

The title of Maile Meloy's new novel is misleading: Do Not Become Alarmed sounds like a suspense story. Granted, I did read it in two nights; but, while I'm a unapologetic fan of thrillers, Meloy's novel is something else, something trickier to characterize. I'd call it a very smart work of literary fiction that exposes how very thin the layer of good luck is that keeps most of us from falling into the abyss.

After defying her country's ban on woman drivers, Manal al Sharif was arrested. The outcry by people all over the world led to her release. She tells her story from growing up in Mecca, and adhering to the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam to being a security engineer at Aramco, the Saudi national oil company.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new short story collections: The Winter Without Milk by Jane Avrich, and The Laws of Evening by Mary Yukari Waters.

Critic-at-large John Powers reviews the autobiographical novel which has become a big bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages. John says the novel is as relevant in America as it is in its home country.

Journeys, near and far, into the past and even into near space, are the subject of the novels, memoirs and narrative histories that make up book critic Maureen Corrigan's early summer reading list.

Pamela Paul of The New York Times talks about her own new book, which chronicles every book she's read since she was 17 years old. Even if a work isn't great, she refuses to brush it aside cavalierly.

Susan Burton has dedicated her life to stopping the cycle of recidivism, not just in her life, but in the lives of other women like her. She founded the organization A New Way of Life which helps women released from prison.