Daniel Menaker

Robert Daniel Menaker (September 17, 1941 – October 26, 2020) was an American fiction writer and editor. He worked with the MFA program at Stony Brook Southampton and as a consultant for Barnes & Noble Bookstores.

Personal life Menaker was born in Manhattan to Robert Menaker — son of a Russian Jewish immigrant — and Mary R. Grace, who was the chief copy editor at Fortune magazine.

Menaker died from pancreatic cancer on October 26, 2020, at his home in New Marlborough, Massachusetts.

Career Menaker was a fiction editor at The New Yorker for twenty years and had material published in the magazine frequently. In 1995 he was hired by Harold Evans as Senior Literary Editor at Random House and later became Executive Editor-in-Chief, working with such writers as Salman Rushdie, Colum McCann, Elizabeth Strout, and Nassim Taleb. After leaving Random House in 2007, he became the host for a web-based book show called "Titlepage" in 2008.

Awards PEN/O. Henry Award for Short Fiction: "The Good Left" 1982 PEN/O. Henry Award for Short Fiction: "The Good Left" 1984 New York Times Notable Book: The Treatment 1998

Publications Friends and Relations: A Collection of Stories - 1976 The Worst (with Charles McGrath) - 1979 The Old Left and Other Stories - 1987 The Treatment (novel) - 1998 A Good Talk: The Story and Skill of Conversation - 2011 My Mistake: A Memoir - 2013 "The Committee: The Story of the 1976 Union Drive at the New Yorker Magazine" - (article, audiobook) 2015 The African Svelte: Ingenious Misspellings that Make Surprising Sense - 2016 Terminalia: Poems - 2021