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Allegra Goodman Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

Author Biography  | Interview  | Books by this Author  | Read-Alikes

Allegra Goodman
Photo © Keller & Keller

Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman Biography

Allegra Goodman was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1967, but grew up in Honolulu. She has been writing prose avidly since the age of seven.

Her first book, a collection of stories titled Total Immersion, was published in 1989 on the same day that she graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. While pursuing her Ph.D in English at Stanford, Goodman also wrote for The New Yorker and completed her second book of stories, The Family Markowitz, which quickly became a national bestseller. The Family Markowitz was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was the fiction winner in the First Annual Salon Book Awards.

Her novels to date are: Kaaterskill Falls (1998), Paradise Park (2001), Intuition (2006), The Other Side of the Island (2008) and The Cookbook Collector (2010). Her short story La Vita Nuova was selected for The Best American Short Stories 2011 and was broadcast on Public Radio International's Selected Shorts in February 2012.

When her husband accepted a job at MIT, they moved back to Cambridge Mass, where they and their now four children still live.

Allegra Goodman's website

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Interview

Allegra Goodman explains her motivation for writing Kaaterskill Falls.

I was born in Brooklyn New York, but only lived there two weeks. I spent my childhood in Hawaii, from the time I was two until I went away to college. At Harvard where I was in the class of '89, I majored in English and philosophy, and wrote and saw the publication of the stories that comprise my first book, Total Immersion. After graduation, I got married and spent a year in England writing fiction while my husband David studied "maths" at Cambridge University. Then we went to Stanford, where he got a Ph.D. in Computer Science, and I got a Ph.D. in English. While at Stanford I wrote most of the stories that make up my second book, The Family Markowitz. Many were published in The New Yorker. But throughout this time I was working on one long term project, a novel: Kaaterskill Falls.

I wrote Kaaterskill Falls for three reasons: The first was that I wanted to capture a particular time and place that had made an indelible impression on me and my family. My mother's family had a house in a small town in upstate New York, and every summer they would leave Brooklyn to enjoy the mountains, the lakes, the trees, the shade, and their dear friends and neighbors, who also came up every year ...

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Books by this Author

Books by Allegra Goodman at BookBrowse
Isola jacket The Cookbook Collector jacket Intuition jacket Paradise Park jacket
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Read-Alikes

All the books below are recommended as read-alikes for Allegra Goodman but some maybe more relevant to you than others depending on which books by the author you have read and enjoyed. So look for the suggested read-alikes by title linked on the right.
How we choose read-alikes

  • Kate Atkinson

    Kate Atkinson

    Kate Atkinson won the Whitbread (now Costa) Book of the Year prize with her first novel, Behind the Scenes at the Museum. Her four bestselling novels featuring former detective Jackson Brodie became the BBC television series ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Intuition

    Try:
    When Will There Be Good News?
    by Kate Atkinson

  • Margaret Atwood

    Margaret Atwood

    is the author of more than fifty books of fiction, poetry, and critical essays. She has won the Booker Prize, the Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, the Franz Kafka Prize, the Peace Prize of the ... (more)

    If you enjoyed:
    Kaaterskill Falls

    Try:
    The Blind Assassin
    by Margaret Atwood

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