Maureen Corrigan
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The Aunt Who Wouldn't Die, by Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, centers on an Indian family haunted by a jealous ghost. And S. A. Cosby's Blacktop Wasteland is a noir thriller — with muscle cars.
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Set in a Dublin maternity ward in 1918, the novel captures a city devastated by a pandemic. By diving into the terrors of the past, Emma Donoghue presciently anticipates the miseries of our present.
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A young woman tries to free her cousin from a dangerous living situation in a crumbling family mansion in Silvia Moreno-Garcia's new novel. Mexican Gothic injects fresh blood into a classic genre.
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The family at the center of Lynn Steger Strong's novel is on the brink of bankruptcy. Want is a portrait of how close to the edge people are — despite the seeming safeguard of middle-class jobs.
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Known for her meditative travel memoirs, Mary Morris' wanderings were nearly curtailed by a serious ankle injury. All the Way to the Tigers is a passage deep into the broken places that shaped her.
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Brit Bennett's new novel centers on two light-skinned African American sisters — one of whom "passes" for white. The Vanishing Half is compelling — if somewhat melodramatic.
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Nancy McKinley mixes screwball humor with social criticism in a collection of interlocking stories about two women who work at a mall in Northeastern Pennsylvania.
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Benjamin Taylor, one of Roth's closest friends during the last decades of his life, has written a memoir that rekindles Roth's voice: brilliant, profane, and so very funny.
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With much of the world on lockdown due to the pandemic, critic Maureen Corrigan turns to books for companionship. Her recommended reads span fiction, nonfiction and poetry — some old, some new.
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The author of Station Eleven weaves together stories of a hotel worker and an ultra-wealthy con man in a novel that captures how precarious life is — in a way that feels particularly resonant now.