Paula Marantz Cohen

Biographical information

Paula Marantz Cohen is a Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University in Philadelphia and author of the best-selling Jane Austen in Boca and Much Ado About Jessie Kaplan. Her novels combine romance, satire, and insight into the experience of Jewish suburban life while drawing on Cohen's love of classic literature. Her work has been featured in Vanity Fair, People Magazine, Hadassah Magazine, and the Jewish Forward. She has been a speaker for the Jewish Book Council at JCC book fairs around the country, and her work has been a Book of the Month Club/Literary Guild and Hadassah Book Club selection. She is also the author of numerous nonfiction books on such topics as literature and the family, silent film and American culture, and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. Her essays and reviews have appeared in the Yale Review, the Times Literary Supplement, and The American Scholar, among others. She is the host of the Drexel InterView, a cable talk show that features prominent personalities in the arts and sciences. She lives in Moorestown, New Jersey, with her husband and two children.

Paula Marantz Cohen has a new book coming out on April 4: Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death, and the SATs, a satirical look at the college admissions frenzy that loosely follows the plot of Jane Austen's last novel, Persuasion.

Discussion topics

• Fact into Fiction: How I Became a Novelist
  How I evolved from a non-fiction writer and scholar to being a popular fiction writer. Anecdotes about becoming a novelist at 47!
• Writing About Jewish Suburbia
  What makes suburbia and the Jewish experience in the suburbs such an interesting topic for fiction.
• Encounters Between Literature and Life
  How my reading and study of literature has informed my writing as well as my life as a wife and mother.
• What Jane Austen Taught Me
  How and why Jane Austen has influenced my creative and emotional life, and why I stole the plot of Pride and Prejudice for my first novel.

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