Daphne Miriam Merkin (born May 30, 1954) [1] is an American literary critic, essayist and novelist. Merkin is a graduate of Barnard College and also attended Columbia University's graduate program in English literature. [2]
She began her career as a book critic for the magazines Commentary , [2] The New Republic , and The New Leader , where she wrote a book column and later, a movie column. [2] In 1986, she became an editor with the publishing house of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. In 1997, after Tina Brown became editor of The New Yorker , Merkin became a film critic for the magazine. She also wrote extensively on books and became known for her frank forays into autobiography; her personal essays dealt with subjects ranging from her battle with depression, to her predilection for spanking, [3] to the unacknowledged complexities of growing up rich on Park Avenue. In 2005, she joined The New York Times Magazine as a contributing writer. She is the author of a novel, Enchantment (1984) [2] as well as two collections of essays, Dreaming of Hitler (1997) [4] and The Fame Lunches (2014), [5] and a memoir, This Close to Happy: A Reckoning With Depression (2017). [6] Her latest novel, 22 Minutes of Unconditional Love (2020), [7] came out in July 2020.
Her parents were the philanthropists Hermann and Ursula Merkin. Her brother is J. Ezra Merkin, a hedge fund manager and philanthropist who was embroiled in the Bernie Madoff scandal. [8]
Merkin teaches writing at the 92nd Street Y. [9] She married and divorced Michael Brod, and lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan with her daughter, Zoe. She also is a contributing editor to Tablet magazine. [10]
Elizabeth Lee Wurtzel was an American writer, journalist, and lawyer known for the confessional memoir Prozac Nation, which she published at the age of 27. Her work often focused on chronicling her personal struggles with depression, addiction, career, and relationships. Wurtzel's work drove a boom in confessional writing and the personal memoir genre during the 1990s, and she was viewed as a voice of Generation X. In later life, Wurtzel worked briefly as an attorney before her death from breast cancer.
Veronica Geng was an American fiction writer, critic, and magazine editor.
Roz Chast is an American cartoonist and a staff cartoonist for The New Yorker. Since 1978, she has published more than 800 cartoons in The New Yorker. She also publishes cartoons in Scientific American and the Harvard Business Review.
Bobbie Ann Mason is an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and literary critic from Kentucky. Her memoir was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
Joshua Aaron Cohen is an American novelist and story writer, best known for his works Witz (2010), Book of Numbers (2015), and Moving Kings (2017). Cohen won the 2022 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus (2021).
Kathryn Harrison is an American author. She has published seven novels, two memoirs, two collections of personal essays, a travelogue, two biographies, and a book of true crime. She reviews regularly for The New York Times Book Review. Her personal essays have been included in many anthologies and have appeared in Bookforum, Harper's Magazine, More Magazine, The New Yorker, O, The Oprah Magazine, and Vogue, Salon, and Nerve.
Gael Greene was an American restaurant critic, author, and novelist. She became New York magazine's restaurant critic in fall 1968, at a time when most New Yorkers were unsophisticated about food and there were few chefs anyone knew by name, and for four decades both documented and inspired the city's and America's growing obsession with food. She was a pioneering "foodie."
Penelope Ruth Mortimer was a Welsh-born English journalist, biographer, and novelist. Her semi-autobiographical novel The Pumpkin Eater (1962) was made into a 1964 film of the same name.
Bookforum is an American book review magazine devoted to books and the discussion of literature. After announcing that it would cease publication in December 2022, it reported its relaunch under the direction of The Nation magazine six months later.
Jane Simone Mendelsohn is an American writer. Her novels are known for their mythic themes, poetic imagery, and allegorical content, as well as themes of female and personal empowerment. Mendelsohn's novel I Was Amelia Earhart was an international bestseller in 1996 and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction.
Ursula Merkin (1919–2006) was a German-born American philanthropist.
Anne Roiphe is an American writer and journalist. She is best known as a first-generation feminist and author of the novel Up the Sandbox (1970), filmed as a starring vehicle for Barbra Streisand in 1972. In 1996, Salon called the book "a feminist classic."
Virginia Heffernan is an American journalist and cultural critic. Since 2015, she has been a political columnist at the Los Angeles Times and a cultural columnist at Wired. From 2003 to 2011, she worked as a staff writer for The New York Times, first as a television critic, then as a magazine columnist, and then as an opinion writer. She has also worked as a senior editor for Harper's, as a founding editor of Talk, and as a TV critic for Slate. Her 2016 book Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art argued that the Internet is a "massive and collective work of art", one that is a "work in progress", and that the suggested deterioration of attention spans in response to it is a myth.
Nothing Natural is the 1986 debut novel by Jenny Diski, initially published in hardback through Simon & Schuster. It follows a young woman who enters into a sadomasochistic relationship with a charming and domineering man. The book, perceived as an S&M-book by the New Yorker, received some backlash upon its release, as critic Anthony Thwaite criticized it as being "the most revolting book I've ever read," and the feminist magazine Sisterwrite chose to ban Diski from publishing with them.
Kathryn Schulz is an American journalist and author. She is a staff writer at The New Yorker. In 2016, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing for her article on the risk of a major earthquake and tsunami in the Pacific Northwest. In 2023, she won the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Memoir or Biography.
Patricia Lockwood is an American poet, novelist, and essayist. Her 2021 debut novel, No One Is Talking About This, won the Dylan Thomas Prize. Her 2017 memoir Priestdaddy won the Thurber Prize for American Humor. Her poetry collections include Motherland Fatherland Homelandsexuals, a 2014 New York Times Notable Book. Since 2019, she has been a contributing editor for The London Review of Books.
Janet Hobhouse was an American novelist, biographer and editor. She is the author of four novels, including the posthumously published The Furies. Her first published work was a biography of Gertrude Stein, Everybody Who was Anybody. She was a contributing editor to ARTnews and also published a monograph on artists' representation of the female nude in the twentieth century. Born in New York City to Henry Hobhouse and Frances Liedloff, she attended the Spence School and Oxford University. Hobhouse was married to journalist and film maker Nick Fraser from January 18, 1974, until their divorce in 1983.
Joanna Rakoff is an American novelist and memoirist.
Marion Winik is an American journalist and author, best known for her work on NPR's All Things Considered.
I Was Amelia Earhart is Jane Mendelsohn’s debut novel, published by Knopf in 1996. It tells a fictional account of what happened to Amelia Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, after they disappeared off the coast of New Guinea in 1937. The book was shortlisted for the 1997 Orange Prize for Fiction and appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List for fourteen weeks.