Books & Literature

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the debut novel Everything is Illuminated (Houghton Mifflin) by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Maria Rosa Menocal is a R. Selden Rose Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is also the author of the new book: The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians created a culture of tolerance in Medieval Spain (Little, Brown). Menocal details Andalucia, Spain from 786 to 1492 where literature, science, and tolerance flourished.

Writer Alec Wilkinson is the author of new memoir, My Mentor: A Young Man's Friendship with William Maxwell (Houghton Mifflin) about his relationship with writer and editor William Maxwell. Maxwell was fiction editor for the New Yorker from 1936-1976 and worked with such authors as J.D. Salinger, John Cheever, John Updike, Eudora Welty and scores of others. Maxwell was the author of a number of novels, including Time Will Darken It, and So Long, See You Tomorrow, as well as several short story collections. He died at the age of 91 in August 2000.

Novelist Rick Moody is the author of The Ice Storm which was made into a film, and the short story collection Demonology. He calls his new book, The Black Veil, a "sort of non-fiction novel." It parallels Moody's investigation of his own family's history of depression. He found that one of his ancestors — a clergyman — was the inspiration for Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story, "The Minister's Black Veil."

Book Critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Bad Blood, a memoir by the late literary critic, Lorna Sage.

Novelist Carol Shields won a Pulitzer Prize for her best-selling novel, The Stone Diaries. Her books are often about middle-class people leading quiet lives. Her other novels include Larrys Party, which won Britains Orange Prize, The Republic of Love and Swann: A Mystery. She also wrote a biography of Jane Austen as well as plays, poetry and story collections. In 1998 Shields was diagnosed with breast cancer. She is now in a late stage of the disease. Her new novel, Unless (Fourth Estate), was written after her diagnosis.

Actor Michael J. Fox got his start acting as a teenager in the popular sitcom Family Ties. He has appeared in many movies, including Back to the Future, The Secret of My Success, and Doc Hollywood. In 1998 he announced that he had Parkinson's disease and he now heads The Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson's Research. He has a new memoir, Lucky Man, (Hyperion).

Sue Graham Mingus' new memoir Tonight at Noon is about her love affair with the late jazz musician and composer Charles Mingus. She is a former magazine editor and publisher, and now works as a music producer. She also created and directs repertory ensembles that carry on the music of her late husband. Tonight at Noon... Three or Four Shades of Love, a CD featuring tracks by the Mingus Big Band and the Charles Mingues Orchestra, was recently released on the Dreyfus Jazz Label.

Writer Richard Lourie. His new book, Sakharov, is a biography of the Russian scientist, dissident and Nobel peace prize winner Andrei Sakharov. He's considered one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century. Sakharov created Russia's H-bomb, but later confronted his country over issues of nuclear responsibility and human rights.

Science fiction writer Sheri S. Tepper is the author of over a dozen novels including, The Fresco, The Family Tree, Grass and her newest, The Visitor. (Harper Collins).

Writer Daniel Harris. His new book is A Memoir of No One in Particular: In which our author indulges in naive indiscretions, a self-aggrandizing solipsism, and an off-putting infatuation with his own bodily functions. (Basic Books) Harris is the author of Cute, Quaint, Hungry and Romantic, as well as The Rise and Fall of Gay Culture. He written for Harpers, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Century's Son (Knopf) by Robert Boswell.

Poet Donald Hall returns to the show to discuss his new collection of poetry, The Painted Bed, much of it written in mourning for his late wife, poet Jane Kenyon. Hall received the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize in poetry for his collection, The One Day, and the 1990 Frost Medal from the Poetry Society of America for Old and New Poems.

Journalist Laura Blumenfeld is the author of the book, Revenge: A Story of Hope (Simon & Schuster). In 1986 her father was shot while visiting Israel. The bullet grazed his head. Ten years later, while a reporter for The Washington Post, Blumenfeld went in search of the shooter as a way to deal with her own feelings of revenge. She found his family who in turn led her to him. She developed a friendship with them, before they knew who she really was.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews The Nanny Diaries (St. Martins Press) by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus.

Writer Bharati Mukherjee's new novel is Desirable Daughters (Theia Press). Mukherjee is an Indian-born writer who emigrated to the U.S. as an adult. Her new novel is about a traditional Brahmin family transformed by contemporary culture. Mukherjee is the author of five novels, two nonfiction books and two collections of short stories, including The Middleman and Other Stories, for which she won the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Writer Gerard Jones is the author of the new book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy Games, Superheroes, and Make Believe Violence (Basic Books). A former creator of comic books, he's written text for Batman, Superman, X-Men, and Pokemon. This is his fourth media studies book. He lives in San Francisco.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews Atonement (Doubleday) the new novel by Ian McEwan.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan comments on the phenomenon of citywide reading groups, where an entire city reads the same book.

Writer Jake Arnott's new novel is He Kills Coppers, a dark thriller set in London in 1966. Arnott's first novel, The Long Firm, is being made into a five-part series for the BBC.