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Rebecca Makkai

Born:
Pen Name: None

Connection to Illinois: Makkai is a Chicago-based author.

Biography: Rebecca Makkai teaches the MFA program at Lake Forest College and Sierra Nevada College and runs StoryStudio Chicago's Novel-in-a-Year workshop. She holds a MA from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English and a BA from Washington and Lee University. Her work was chosen to be included The Best American Short Stories anthology for four consecutive years - 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011. It also appears regularly in publications such as Harper's, Tin House, Ploughshares, New England Review and Ecotone, and on public radio's This American Life and Selected Shorts. Makkai is the recipient of several fellowships including a 2014 NEA Fellowship.


Awards:
  • The Borrower Finalist, Pulitzer Prize Finalist, National Book Award Carnegie Medal, ALA Winner, LA Times Book Prize Winner, Stonewall Award Ten Best Books of 2018, New York Times
  • The Hundred Year House Starred Reviews, Library Journal, Booklist, Publishers Weekly, Shelf Awareness
  • Music for Wartime Starred Reviews, Publishers Weekly Must-read Lists, Chicago Tribune, O Magazine, BuzzFeed, The Huffington Post, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and The L Magazine
  • The Great Believers Finalist, Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Andrew Carnegie Medal Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction Stonewall Book AwardNew York Times Top 10 Book, 2018 Finalist, National Book Award Stonewall Book Award New York Times Top 10 Book, 2018Starred Review, Booklist and Publishers Weekly
  • I Have Some Questions for You NY Times Bestseller, Named Best Book of 2023 by USA Today, Esquire, Real Simple, PopSugar and CrimeReads, Starred Reviews - Publishers Weekly, BookPage, Library Journal and Booklist, Illinois Reads Book Selection, Illinois Reading Council, 2024

Primary Literary Genre(s): Fiction

Primary Audience(s): Adult readers

E-Mail: rebeccamakkai@gmail.com
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/RebeccaMakkai
Twitter: https://twitter.com/rebeccamakkai
Web: http://rebeccamakkai.com/
Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebecca_Makkai


Selected Titles

I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel
ISBN: 0593490142 OCLC:

Viking 2023

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.

Music for Wartime :
ISBN: 0525426698 OCLC: 893895002

Presents a collection of wide-ranging, evocative short stories, including several inspired by the author's family history or featuring protagonists whose lives are shaped by irony.

The Borrower
ISBN: 9780143120957 OCLC: 757470559

Lucy Hull, a young children's librarian in Hannibal, Missouri, finds herself both a kidnapper and kidnapped when her favorite patron, ten-year-old Ian Drake, runs away from home. The precocious Ian is addicted to reading, but needs Lucy's help to smuggle books past his overbearing mother, who has enrolled Ian in weekly antigay classes with celebrity Pastor Bob. Lucy stumbles into a moral dilemma when she finds Ian camped out in the library after hours with a knapsack of provisions and an escape plan. Desperate to save him from Pastor Bob and the Drakes, Lucy allows herself to be hijacked by Ian. The odd pair embarks on a crazy road trip from Missouri to Vermont, with ferrets, an inconvenient boyfriend, and upsetting family history thrown in their path. But is it just Ian who is running away? Who is the man who seems to be on their tail? And should Lucy be trying to save a boy from his own parents?

The Great Believers
ISBN: 0735223521 OCLC: 1031046204

In 1985, Yale Tishman, the development director for an art gallery in Chicago, is about to pull off an amazing coup, bringing in an extraordinary collection of 1920s paintings as a gift to the gallery. Yet as his career begins to flourish, the carnage of the AIDS epidemic grows around him. One by one, his friends are dying and after his friend Nico’s funeral, the virus circles closer and closer to Yale himself. Soon the only person he has left is Fiona, Nico’s little sister.Thirty years later, Fiona is in Paris tracking down her estranged daughter who disappeared into a cult. While staying with an old friend, a famous photographer who documented the Chicago crisis, she finds herself finally grappling with the devastating ways AIDS affected her life and her relationship with her daughter. The two intertwining stories take us through the heartbreak of the eighties and the chaos of the modern world, as both Yale and Fiona struggle to find goodness in the midst of disaster.

The Hundred-Year House
ISBN: 052542668X OCLC: 861478903

Meet the Devohrs: Zee, a Marxist literary scholar who detests her parents’ wealth but nevertheless finds herself living in their carriage house; Gracie, her mother, who claims she can tell your lot in life by looking at your teeth; and Bruce, her step-father, stockpiling supplies for the Y2K apocalypse and perpetually late for his tee time. Then there’s Violet Devohr, Zee’s great-grandmother, who they say took her own life somewhere in the vast house, and whose massive oil portrait still hangs in the dining room.Violet’s portrait was known to terrify the artists who resided at the house from the 1920s to the 1950s, when it served as the Laurelfield Arts Colony—and this is exactly the period Zee’s husband, Doug, is interested in. An out-of-work academic whose only hope of a future position is securing a book deal, Doug is stalled on his biography of the poet Edwin Parfitt, once in residence at the colony. All he needs to get the book back on track—besides some motivation and self-esteem—is access to the colony records, rotting away in the attic for decades. But when Doug begins to poke around where he shouldn’t, he finds Gracie guards the files with a strange ferocity, raising questions about what she might be hiding. The secrets of the hundred-year house would turn everything Doug and Zee think they know about her family on its head—that is, if they were to ever uncover them.In this brilliantly conceived, ambitious, and deeply rewarding novel, Rebecca Makkai unfolds a generational saga in reverse, leading the reader back in time on a literary scavenger hunt as we seek to uncover the truth about these strange people and this mysterious house. With intelligence and humor, a daring narrative approach, and a lovingly satirical voice, Rebecca Makkai has crafted an unforgettable novel about family, fate and the incredible surprises life can offer.

 

 

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