The Host of Titlepage

Editorial Producer and Presenter: Daniel Menaker

Daniel Menaker was born in New York City. He attended Swarthmore College and received a Master's Degree in English Literature from the Johns Hopkins University.

After teaching for three years in independent schools, he began his twenty-six-year career at The New Yorker as a fact checker in 1969, and seven years later became a senior editor specializing in fiction. There he was the first editor to publish such newcomers as Michael Cunningham, George Saunders, Michael Chabon, Jennifer Egan, Matthew Klam, Antonya Nelson, Ann Cummins, David Foster Wallace, and Susan Minot, and he also worked with well-recognized authors such as Alice Munro, Mavis Gallant, Richard Preston, V. S. Pritchett, Elmore Leonard, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Pauline Kael.

In 1995 he went to Random House as Vice President, Senior Literary Editor. The first novel he edited was the publishing phenomenon Primary Colors by Anonymous. In 2001 he became Executive Editor at Harper Collins, returning to Random House in 2003 as Editor-in-Chief of the Random House Publishing Group, a division within Random House, Inc. As Executive Editor-in-Chief, he worked with such authors as Salman Rushdie, Billy Collins, Elizabeth Strout, Molly Ivins, Gary Shteyngart, Colum McCann, Arthur Philips, Benjamin Kunkel, Deborah Garrison, Reza Aslan, and Sister Helen Prejean.

“Reading is always an act of solitude, but it always leads to engagement with life.”

Daniel Menaker is also the author of two books of short stories--Friends and Relations and The Old Left--and a novel, The Treatment, which was published by Knopf, and, with Charles McGrath of the New York Times, a short humor book called The Worst. He still contributes occasional humor pieces and music reviews and book reviews to such publications as The New Yorker, The New York Times, Slate, and B&N.com.

He has twice won the O. Henry Prize for short stories, and an independent feature film version of The Treatment, starring Ian Holm, Famke Janssen, and Chris Eigeman was released in 2006. He left Random House in June of 2007, and in addition to his involvement with all aspects of Titlepage.tv, he is at work on a book called A Good Talk, about conversation. He also serves on the Board of the Poetry Foundation and is teaching a course in narrative nonfiction at the City University of New York Graduate Center.