Books & Literature

Writer Claire Hoffman describes her childhood living in a community devoted to Transcendental Meditation. She was meditating at the age of 3.

When Emily Dickinson died in the 1880s, she was a reclusive, barely published writer. Today, she is a fully canonized, iconic poet. Former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins says the progress of her status was unprecedented.

A debut novel by Yaa Gyasi is one of this summer's most anticipated novels.

While serving as a State Department adviser in Iraq and Afghanistan, J. Kael Weston instigated a military mission that resulted the death of 31 service members. His memoir revisits the tragedy of war.

The suspense stories on Maureen Corrigan's early summer reading list roam from the beaches of Long Island to the Welsh coast, and from the mean streets of Chicago to the alleyways of Berlin.

Pamela Eren's incisive new book Eleven Hours features only two main characters and is an incisive novel about birth.

Pulitzer prize winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen says he wants to take the narrative of the Vietnam war created by Americans and retell it from the perspective of the Vietnamese. His family left Vietnam after the fall of Saigon when he was 4.

A review of the new Whit Stillman film Love & Friendship, based on a posthumously published novel by Jane Austen.

Graphic novelist Daniel Clowes, best known for his graphic novel Ghost World, has a new book, Patience, a love story that was five years in the making. In it, Clowes uses time travel to explore themes like tragedy and regret.

In Jennifer Haigh's new novel Heat & Light she examines what happens when fracking comes to a small Pennsylvania town. Maureen Corrigan describes the book as Haigh's "most ambitious - and compelling - novel yet."

The Pulitzer-Prize winning author of Empire Falls says his characters are inspired by his parents' working-class World War II generation. Russo's new novel is set in a small town in upstate New York.

Historian Frank Dikötter says newly opened archives offer fresh details about the chaos China experienced in the 1960s, when Chairman Mao urged students to take to the streets.

In his new memoir, Under The Big Black Sun: A Personal History Of L.A. Punk, John Doe of the band X brings together his own essays and stories from other musicians and scene-makers of that time. A conversation with Doe, with his bandmate Exene Cervenka, and with Dave Alvin of the Blasters who played with X for a short time.

Music critic Lloyd Schwartz first met poet Elizabeth Bishop when she moved to Cambridge in the early 1970s after living in Brazil for nearly 20 years. Now Schwartz has co-edited a new collection of work by the former U.S. Poet Laureate.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews the new memoir The Bridge Ladies by middle-aged baby boomer Betsy Lerner who invites herself into her mother's long-running bridge game as a way of trying to understand a generation that still seems to play its cards too close to its chest.

Book critic Maureen Corrigan reviews two new historical suspense novels that she says you will want to stay up all night to finish.

Seventy-four-year-old author Arlene Heyman discusses her debut short-story collection, which focuses on the sex lives and intimate relationships of characters in their 60s and 70s.

The co-star of the X-Files discusses his novel, Bucky F*cking Dent, about a son reuniting with his absentee father. Duchovny earned a master's degree in literature before starting his TV career.

Edward Humes describes his new book as a "transportation detective story" that chronicles the hidden characters, locations and machinery driving our same-day-delivery, traffic-packed world.

At the age of 85, Edna O'Brien has just brought out one of her best and most ambitious novels yet. The Little Red Chairs is personal and political; charming and grotesque; a novel of manners and a novel of monsters.