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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At first, Lisa Halliday's novel seems too familiar: It's about a young would-be writer who has an affair with a famous older man. But partway through, it turns into something else, something new.
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Michael Wolff's incendiary new book about the first year of Donald Trump's presidency has plenty of juicy detail about chaos, infighting and cheeseburgers — but it's best read with a grain of salt.
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Wilson — the first woman to translate The Odyssey — has created a fresh, authoritative and slyly humorous version of Homer's epic that scours away archaisms while preserving nuance and complexity.
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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.
