Maureen Corrigan Book Recommendations & Book Mentions

Maureen Corrigan

[The Poet's House] is a closely observed, droll, coming-of-age story about an insecure young woman drawn into a shimmering clique of poets; it's also a wise story about the corrosive power of shame and the primal fear of sounding stupid, unsophisticated and sentimental.

Maureen Corrigan

Is Less Is Lost as good, as funny, as poignant as its predecessor? ... Yes, at least! There are extended comic passages here about Less' Walloon ancestry and a mediocre gay men's chorus singing Leonard Cohen songs that I read aloud, laughing, to anyone I could waylay.

Maureen Corrigan

The Bronx? You gotta be kidding me. That’s how I imagine a lot of people might react to the thought of reading a 500-plus-page history of the Bronx... But read the opening chapter... and I think it’s a good bet that, like a car stuck on the Major Deegan Expressway, you’ll stay put for hours, except voluntarily.

Maureen Corrigan

Spufford summons a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin... He weds these hardboiled elements to an eerie story about the vanished city of Cahokia, the largest urban center north of Mexico before Columbus...

Maureen Corrigan

[Water, Water] delivered beauty, inspiration, and humor—just when I needed them most... [It includes some of] the best poems Billy Collins has ever written.

Maureen Corrigan

RT @nprfreshair: TODAY: 'Early Morning Riser' by Katherine Heiny and 'Secrets of Happiness' by Joan Silber ruminate on love and family -- p…

Maureen Corrigan

Dream Girl, by Laura Lippman book review - The Washington Post https://t.co/YCHDZ6CFUQ

Maureen Corrigan

Anthony Doerr’s first novel since ‘All the Light We Cannot See.’ https://www.wsj.com/articles/cloud-cuckoo-land-anthony-doerr-review-slipping-the-trap-11632858500?st=0opdpznzdw8fyr8&reflink=desktopwebshare_twitter via @WSJ

Maureen Corrigan

It’s only January, but your perfect summer thriller is here already... As a storyteller, Burke is a master knot maker... Because it's impossible to give a sense of how very clever the plot of The Note is without ruining the fun of reading it, I'll simply say that nothing is as it seems.

Maureen Corrigan

The only "beauty" to be found [in the book] is in the vividness of Moshfegh's language and the cleverness of her plot, which is an elaborate snicker at the gullibility of anyone who thinks ancestry can be reliably traced through birth records.