Rachel Cantor is the author of the novels Half-Life of a Stolen Sister (Soho Press 2023), Good on Paper (Melville House 2016), and A Highly Unlikely Scenario(Melville House 2014). Two dozen of her stories have been published in the Paris Review, One Story, Ninth Letter, Kenyon Review, New England Review, and elsewhere, and she has written about fiction for National Public Radio, the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, and other publications. Cantor grew up in Rome and lives in Brooklyn where she is writing a series of novels set in Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
At MacDowell in 2001, Cantor began her first novel, Good on Paper. In 2010, she began her third, Half-Life of a Stolen Sister. During her 2019 residency, she wrote more than 150 pages of The Names, the second novel in a series of speculative novels for young people set on the Lower East Side, and during her 2025 residency, Cantor finished a first draft of Doris & the Eclipse, the fourth and final book in that series.
Portrait by Marianne Barcellona
