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Allegra Goodman Biography, Books, and Similar Authors

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

Allegra Goodman
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Allegra Goodman

Allegra Goodman Biography

Allegra Goodman's novels include The Chalk Artist, Intuition, The Cookbook Collector, Paradise Park, and Kaaterskill Falls (a National Book Award finalist). Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, Commentary, and Ploughshares and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Awards and Best American Short Stories. She has written two collections of short stories, The Family Markowitz and Total Immersion and a novel for younger readers, The Other Side of the Island. Her essays and reviews have appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, The New Republic, The Boston Globe, The Jewish Review of Books, and The American Scholar. Raised in Honolulu, Goodman studied English and philosophy at Harvard and received a PhD in English literature from Stanford. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writer's Award, the Salon Award for Fiction, and a fellowship from the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she is writing a new novel.

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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