Maureen Corrigan

It's a rusty old bucket of a plot contrivance: throw a bunch of strangers together on a boat and roil the waters with a big storm or a white whale. But, in her latest novel, The Last Cruise, Kate Christensen demonstrates there's life yet to be found in what may appear to be the creakiest of fictional premises.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new novel 'My Year of Rest and Relaxation,' about a grieving woman trying to sleep long enough to relieve existential pain.

Deborah Levy opens her new memoir, The Cost of Living, by telling us one of those small stories whose size, like an ant or a virus, stands in inverse proportion to its power.

Richard Ratay book, Don't Make Me Pull Over!, is a very breezy history of the family road trip, which had its heyday, at least for some Americans, from the 1950s into the '70s. Main-Travelled Roads, by Hamlin Garland, a writer barely anybody knows anymore. Garland's short stories are vivid and tough in their take on the realities of Midwestern farm life, especially for women.

Here's the thing about There There, the debut novel by Native American author Tommy Orange: Even if the rest of its story were just so-so — and it's much more than that — the novel's prologue would make this book worth reading.

In the relaxed days of summer, critic Maureen Corrigan reflexively reaches for a mystery. This year, she's settling in with The Dime, by Kathleen Kent, and The Death of Mrs. Westaway, by Ruth Ware.

On the acknowledgments page of her new short story collection, Florida, Lauren Groff thanks Florida, where she lives and which she calls the "sunniest and strangest of states."

I didn't know how much I needed a laugh until I began reading Stephen McCauley's new novel, My Ex-Life. This is the kind of witty, sparkling, sharp novel for which the verb "chortle" was invented.

Before Zora Neale Hurston wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God and the other books that would make her reputation, she was studying anthropology. In 1927, Hurston's deep interest in black history and culture led her into what became one of the most remarkable conversations of her life. The book that resulted from that conversation has just been published for the first time.

This is one weird-but-true story. It's a story that leads readers from 19th century scientific expeditions into the jungles of Malaysia to the "feather fever" of the turn of the last century, when women's hats were be-plumed with ostriches and egrets. And it's a story that focuses on the feather-dependent Victorian art of salmon fly-tying and its present-day practitioners, many of whom lurk online in something called "The Feather Underground."