Maureen Corrigan

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

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.

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.

It's hard to focus right now. So recommending a book can seem, well, out-of-touch. Unless, that is, the recommendation is for a novel that's so absorbing, so fully realized that it draws you out of your own constricted situation and expands your sense of possibilities. For me, over the past 10 days or so, the novel that's performed that act of deliverance has been The Glass Hotel, by Emily St. John Mandel.

Lily King's new novel centers on a woman who's spent six years working on her own novel. It's a story of ambition — and what happens when the markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize.

Writer's block can be temporary — or it can be massive and long lasting. After her third short story collection, Honey, came out in 1993, Elizabeth Tallent fell victim to a rockfall, avalanche, total-impasse-of-the-imagination writer's block and didn't publish another book for 22 years.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan says this is the only dystopian novel she's ever read where images of doom and baseball diamonds co-exist.