Maureen Corrigan
Appearances
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Unprecedented surely was one of the most popular words of 2024, so it's fitting that my best books list begins with an unprecedented occurrence, two novels by authors who happen to be married to each other. James by Percival Everett reimagines Huckleberry Finn told from the point of view of Jim, Huck's enslaved companion on that immortal raft ride.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Alternating mordant humor with horror, Everett makes readers understand that for Jim, here called James, the Mississippi may offer a temporary haven, But given the odds of him making it to freedom, the river will likely be a vast highway to a scary nowhere. Everett is married to Danzy Senna, whose novel Colored Television is a revelatory satire on race and class.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Senna's main character, Jane, is a mixed-race writer and college teacher struggling to finish her second novel. Desperate for money, Jane cons her way into a meeting with a Hollywood producer who's cooking up a biracial situation comedy. Disaster ensues. Senna's writing is droll and fearless. Listen to Jane's thoughts about teaching.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
One of the worst parts of teaching was how, like a series of mini-strokes, it ruined you as a writer. A brain could handle only so many undergraduate stories about date rape and eating disorders, dead grandmothers, and mystical dogs. Two other novels invite readers to catch up with familiar characters.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Long Island is Colm Tobin's sequel to his 2009 bestseller, Brooklyn, whose main character, Eilish Lacey, is now trapped in a marriage and a neighborhood as stifling as the Irish town she fled. It's Tobin's omissions and restraint, the words he doesn't write, that make him such an astute chronicler of this working-class Catholic world.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
I've come to dread a new novel by Elizabeth Strout because I usually can't avoid putting it on my best-of-the-year list. Tell Me Everything reunites readers with writer Lucy Barton, lawyer Bob Burgess, and retired teacher Olive Kitteridge, all living in Maine.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Nobody nails the soft melancholy of the human condition like Strout, and that's a phrase she would never write because her style is so understated. Martyr is Iranian-American poet Kaveh Akbar's debut novel about a young man named Cyrus Shams struggling to make sense of the violent death of his mother and other martyrs, accidental or deliberate, throughout history.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Akbar's tone is unexpectedly comic, his story antic, and his vision utterly original. Two literary novels on my best list are indebted to suspense fiction. Rachel Kushner's Creation Lake is an espionage thriller sealed tight in the plastic wrap of noir. Her main character, a young woman, is a former FBI agent turned freelance spy who infiltrates a radical farming collective in France.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
You don't read Kushner for the relatability of her characters. Instead, it's her dead-on language and orange threat alert atmosphere that draw readers in. In Cahokia Jazz, Frances Spufford summons up a femme fatale, crooked cops and politicians, and working-class resentment as bitter as bathtub gin.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
He weds these hard-boiled elements to a story about the actual vanished city of Cahokia, which before the arrival of Columbus was the largest urban center north of Mexico. Spufford's novel is set in an alternative America of 1922, where the peace of Cahokia's indigenous, white, and African-American populations is threatened by a grisly murder. One straightforward suspense novel sits on this list.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Liz Moore's The God of the Woods. There's a touch of gothic excess about Moore's story, beginning with the premise that not one, but two children from the wealthy Van Laar family disappear from a camp in the Adirondacks some 14 years apart. Moore's previous book, Long Bright River, was a superb novel about the opioid crisis in Philadelphia.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
The God of the Woods is something stranger and unforgettable. Nonfiction closes out this list. I've thought about A Wilder Shore, Camille Perry's biography of the bohemian marriage of Fanny and Robert Louis Stevenson ever since reading it this summer. In her introduction, Perry says something that's also haunted me.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
She describes her book as an intimate window into how the Stephensons lived and loved, a story that is, I hope, an inspiration for anyone seeking a freer, more unconventional life. That it is. I began this list with the word unprecedented, and I'll end it with an unprecedented voice, that of Emily Dickinson. A monumental collection of the letters of Emily Dickinson was published this year.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Edited by Dickinson scholars Chris Dan Miller and Donald Mitchell, it's the closest thing we'll probably ever have to an autobiography by the poet. Here's a thank you note Dickinson wrote in the 1860s to her beloved sister-in-law. Dear Sue, the supper was delicate and strange. I ate it with compunction as I would eat a vision. 1,304 letters are collected here, and still they're not enough.
Fresh Air
Best Of: Jon Batiste's 'Beethoven Blues' / Visual Artist Mickalene Thomas
Happy holidays. Happy reading.