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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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.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz's latest is set at a tony New England college rocked by racial unrest. It's a suggestive exploration of tough issues, but lacks the nuance and intellect of the best campus novels.
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Elif Batuman has sung the praises of "long novels, pointless novels," and she puts her money where her mouth is with The Idiot, a tale of youthful confusion that can be both boring and beautiful.
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Jamie Attenberg's newest novel follows a woman living her life unapologetically, and on her own terms. But that kind of life can is not necessarily a good one.
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Katie Kitamura's new novel follows an unnamed narrator who tails her estranged, disappeared husband to Greece — while keeping the ominous surroundings and disquieting emotions at a cool remove.
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Reporter Claudia Rowe documents her fascination with serial killer Kendall Francois in The Spider and the Fly — but the book focuses on Rowe's thoughts and needs at the expense of the victims.
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In Han Kang's sharp, almost painfully sensitive new novel, set during and after South Korea's 1980 Gwangju student uprising, people spill blood — but they also brave death to donate it.
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Matt Fraction and Christian Ward's splendidly trippy, genderbent retelling of the Odyssey sets the story in space, as warlike Odyssia, "witchjack and wanderer" winds her way home to far Ithicaa.