Martha parker
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A staff writer for the New Yorker since 1986, Adam Gopnik was born in Philadelphia and raised in Montreal. He received his BA. in Art History from McGill University, before completing his graduate work at the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. His first essay in The New Yorker, "Quattrocento Baseball" appeared in May of 1986 and he served as the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995. That year, he left New York to live and write in Paris, where he wrote the magazine’s “Paris Journal” for the next five years. His expanded collection of his essays from Paris, Paris To the Moon, appeared in 2000, and was called by the New York Times “the finest book on France in recent years.” While in Paris, he began work on an adventure novel, The King In The Window, which was published in 2005, and which the Journal of Fantasy & Science Fiction called “a spectacularly fine children’s novel…children’s literature of the highest order, which means literature of the highest order.” He still often writes from Paris for the New Yorker, has edited the anthology American “Adam Gopnik is one of the greatest thinkers and wordsmiths of our age.” —Krista Tippett “Gopnik’s performances sparkle with buoyant humanity, philosophical ruminations, strikingly memorable images. He has a simpatico relationship with the audience, who connect immediately with the clever humor and heart-felt cadences strung together by this poetic and marvelous craftsman. His ninety minute show is just smashing.” —TheaterPizazz “A dazzling talent—hilarious, winning and deft.” —Malcolm Gladwell Adam Gopnik, legendary and beloved writer for the New Yorker, has—in his three decades with the magazine—written fiction, humor, memoirs, critical essays, and reported pieces from at home and abroad. He was the magazine’s art critic from 1987 to 1995, and the Paris correspondent from 1995 to 2000. Gopnik has received three National Magazine awards for essays and for criticism, the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and the Canadian National Magazine Award Gold Medal for arts writing. In March of 2013, he was awarded the medal of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Lett Adam Gopnik arrived in New York City from Montreal in 1980 "with a satchel full of ambitions." First among them was the dream of becoming a songwriter. A close second was the desire to write for The New Yorker. He pursued both while officially being in New York to do graduate work in art history at the Institute of Fine Arts. The songwriting career, alas, remains an elusive brass ring for Gopnik. But after six years of sitting in a 9-by-11 basement apartment on East 87th Street that he shared with his then-girlfriend-now-wife, Martha, hammering out weekly pieces that he would submit to the Talk of the Town section, Gopnik "finally, finally" broke in at The New Yorker in 1986. He soon became one of the magazine’s pre-eminent essayists. "For me what makes the essay such a miraculous form," Gopnik says during a call to his family’s newer, larger, non-basement Upper East side apartment, "is that it’s the only form where ideas and emotions walk hand-in-hand. The novel or short story can be a highly intellectual f
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Adam Gopnik
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