2010 Presenters
Allegra Goodman
Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, Allegra Goodman published her first short story, “Variant Text” in Commentary magazine when she was seventeen and her first book the day she graduated from Harvard University in 1989. While attending graduate school at Stanford, she published her second book, The Family Markowitz, which was a 1996 New York Times Notable Book. In 1997 she earned her PhD in English literature, and currently teaches a writing workshop in the graduate program in Creative Writing at Boston University.
Her novels Kaaterskill Falls, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, Paradise Park, Intuition, The Other Side of the Island, and her most recent, The Cookbook Collector have all been published to widespread acclaim. Her short fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Good Housekeeping, Slate, and The American Scholar. Named by The New Yorker as one of the twenty best writers under forty, she is also the recipient of a Whiting Award and the Salon magazine award for fiction.
Publisher’s Weekly notes in its starred review of The Cookbook Collector, “If any contemporary author deserves to wear the mantle of Jane Austen, it’s [Allegra] Goodman, whose subtle, astute social comedies perfectly capture the quirks of human nature. This dazzling novel . . . is Goodman’s most robust, fully realized and trenchantly meaningful work yet.”
LINKS:
Goodman's Newtonville Books Questionnaire
Goodman write a short story for The New Yorker, "La Vita Nuova"
Powell's Books interviews Goodman
The Kansas City Star reviews The Cookbook Collector
The Dallas Morning News reviews The Cookbook Collector
