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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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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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