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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An unexpected and interesting aspect of the book is the way it brims with experiences of the body, including Couric's years struggling with bulimia and the warping effects of having her looks managed.
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Pat Barker returns to the scene of the Trojan War in The Women of Troy, but this time after the city has fallen and its women are grieving their old lives while trying to figure out their new ones.
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There's something that feels impossible about leaving behind the place in which we slunk our way through the last year plus. Until Proven Safe takes us to the places others lingered through time.
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Olivia Laing weaves the history of people and ideas in with her own life, bringing readers on a fleet, gracious tour of bodily distress and joy that takes in Malcolm X, the Marquis de Sade and others.
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Kazuo Ishiguro's lovely, mournful new novel is set in a world where children can have android companions, known as Artificial Friends — but can those artificial friends ever replace the children?
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Sarah Moss's new novel takes place over a single, unrelentingly rainy day at a vacation site in Scotland, where families complain about each other and mounting dread builds to catastrophe at the end.
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Ward says she didn't know as a journalist she would "have my heart broken in a hundred different ways, that I would lose friends and watch children die and grow to feel like an alien in my own skin."
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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.
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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.