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.
-
Also: NPR Books launches a new series called "Book Your Trip"; David Levithan on why it's important for LGBTQ characters to be well represented in YA novels.
-
Jennifer Weiner's latest tells the tale of a suburban mom whose outwardly happy life is derailed by pills. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says the book is hampered by clumsy writing and cruel stereotypes.
-
Christopher Isherwood was in his 40s when he met the teenage Don Bachardy. They spent the next three decades making up a tender storybook world, expressed in a new collection of their love letters.
-
Something mysterious stalks a shepherdess on a remote British island in Evie Wyld's visceral new novel, All the Birds, Singing. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn calls it "a museum of sinister curiosities."
-
Maggie Shipstead's latest is named after Sergei Diaghilev's famous admonition to his dancers. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says that, while not astonishing, it's a "lemon tart of a book, lovely and neat." -
Also: A Q&A with Wolitzer; author behind the @GSElevator account gets a new book deal; Matt Seidel mocks the writerly trope of beginning essays with "There are two kinds of novelists ..."
-
With the release of her fifth novel, Boy, Snow, Bird, Helen Oyeyemi is growing out of the literary wunderkind label and into something richer and stranger. Annalisa Quinn has a profile.
-
Flora & Ulysses, written by Kate DiCamillo and illustrated in black and white by K.G. Campbell, is this year's best children's book, according to the American Library Association. Locomotive, by Brian Floca, is the most distinguished picture book. -
The women of Jezebel.com have released a new illustrated encyclopedia of "lady things" from Clueless to Clytemnestra. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says that although The Book of Jezebel is positioned as lighthearted and unambitious, it has a serious aim — which it does not quite achieve.
-
Cambridge classics professor Mary Beard's latest book, Confronting the Classics, takes a gleefully contrarian approach to marble-bust greats like Homer and Thucydides. Reviewer Annalisa Quinn says the work "expertly straddles the line between scholarly and accessible."
