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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The flattening effect of political discourse, insipidity of the first lady role and her own remoteness have led us to either forget she has an inner life — or to imagine her as an elegant prisoner. -
While Suzanne Collins leaves readers uncertain of the answer to the question she poses in The Hunger Games — how much of character is innate, how much formed — it becomes painfully obvious here.
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In Curtis Sittenfeld's new novel, Hillary Rodham dumps Bill Clinton and goes on to forge a life of her own, in law and then politics. It's an uncomfortable, moving, technically brilliant book.
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At her best, Olivia Laing turns criticism into an elevated form of hospitality: Like a good party host, she introduces you to someone, tells you what she likes about them, then leaves you to it.
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In charming, anxious, tender essays, writer Mark O'Connell examines his own apocalyptic frame of mind by taking "a series of perverse pilgrimages" to subcultures preparing for the end of the world.
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C Pam Zhang's debut novel follows a brother and sister, children of Chinese laborers, as the search the dusty hills of Gold Rush-era California for a place to bury their father's body.
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Casey Schwartz writes of her reliance on Adderall and her realization that the focus it brought was not genuine. But she leaves readers wanting to hear more on the relationship of attention and love.
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The ABC White House correspondent avoids bravado and knows better than to let insiders use his book to sound off about their enemies. But the obviousness of his account reveals an alarming truth.
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"[P]erhaps the best thing creative work can do is to compost into the soil so that, unremembered, it becomes the food of a new era, or rather, devoured, digested, the very consciousness of that era."
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In Quan Barry's charming novel, a team's luck changes when its members pledge themselves to the forces of eternal darkness by signing a spiral notebook with Emilio Estevez's face on it.
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Gish Jen's new novel takes place in a dystopian future country called AutoAmerica, where the swamp-dwelling underclass — called "Surplus" — are set against the fair-skinned, land-dwelling "Netted."
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In his new book, The New Yorker's Joshua Yaffa is as much an ethicist as he is a reporter, presenting a portrait of the Russian state through those who have decided to compromise with it.
