Annalisa Quinn
Annalisa Quinn is a contributing writer, reporter, and literary critic for NPR. She created NPR's Book News column and covers literature and culture for NPR.
Quinn studied English and Classics at Georgetown University and holds an M.Phil in Classical Greek from the University of Cambridge, where she was a Cambridge Trust scholar.
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Kevin Young's new book puts forth an instantly convincing pairing of race and hoaxing — both a "fake thing pretending to be real." But he loses readers' trust with knotty, overly aphoristic writing.
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Pullman — author of the beloved His Dark Materials trilogy — says poet William Blake's idea of mystical multiple vision, of different ways of seeing, is "absolutely central" to his new book. -
Eleanor Henderson's novel, set in 1930s Georgia, seeks to portray a time when "slavery was over, but not past," says our reviewer. But a lack of nuance keeps its characters from emerging as individuals.
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A new book worries that growing up with smartphones and the Internet has been harmful to a generation of kids. Critic Annalisa Quinn says intergenerational carping is a long, and unhelpful tradition.
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Jesmyn Ward's lush and lonely new novel is set amid the mud, blood and heat of Mississippi. It's a road-trip odyssey complicated by hunger, sickness and the murderous racism that infects the town.
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Edgar Allan Poe once wrote that the death of a beautiful woman is "unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." In her new book, The Burning Girl, Claire Messud responds: Not to us women.
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Anne Helen Petersen's new book is a thoughtful consideration of several public women — from Nicki Minaj to Hillary Clinton — who've run up against the invisible expectations our culture has of them.
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David Sedaris is great company in this new collected volume of his diaries. He buries emotions deep, but describes the world around him (and his love for IHOP) in chaotic and delightful fashion.
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Ivanka Trump's new book — named after her brand's marketing campaign — is packed with anodyne advice borrowed from others, and a striking lack of awareness about economic and racial realities.
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Deb Olin Unferth's story collection delights in going in unexpected directions, and her sensitively-drawn characters feel the full, real, often contradictory and uneasy layering of human emotion.
