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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In Jennifer Egan's novel, there is a persistent, lovely countermelody to the corporate project of mapping human experience; it's full of people engaged in a sweeter and more plaintive human algebra. -
Even when nominally about something else, the essays in These Precious Days are about the weight and grief of relationships. "I was asking what mattered most in this precarious and precious life." -
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. -
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. -
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. -
In a new book, The Radium Girls author Kate Moore follows the struggles of Elizabeth Packard who, locked up by her husband in 1860 for having opinions and voicing them, finds she's not the only one. -
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. -
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? -
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. -
Former Washington Post leader Len Downie is well-placed to offer a look at 50 years in news — but he also writes of times he had to weigh the public's right to know against national security.
