How NY Times Bestselling Author Rebecca Makkai Writes

The Writer Files: Writing, Productivity, Creativity, and Neuroscience

New York Times bestselling author and Pulitzer finalist, Rebecca Makkai, spoke with me about her love of the short story, the true crime industrial complex, and her latest “literary feminist boarding school murder mystery,” I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU.

Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award finalist, won a slew of awards, and was one of The New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018.

Her latest novel is I Have Some Questions for You, named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by TIME, The Seattle Times, Good Housekeeping, Today.com, CrimeReads, NPR, and many others.

Described by the San Francisco Chronicle as, "part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age," and The New York Times Book Review as, "A spellbinding work …" Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan called the book, “Part boarding school drama, part forensic whodunnit, I Have Some Questions for You is a true literary mystery—haunting and hard to put down.”

Rebecca is a 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her work has been translated into 20 languages, and her short fiction has been anthologized in The Pushcart Prize XLI (2017), The Best American Short Stories 2011, 2010, 2009 and 2008, and many others.

Stay tuned until the end of the show for a preview of the Audiobook, excerpted courtesy Penguin Random House Audio from I HAVE SOME QUESTIONS FOR YOU by Rebecca Makkai, read by Julia Whelan and JD Jackson.

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In this file Rebecca Makkai and I discussed:

• Why she chose to become an educator early on in her career
• The importance of 15 years of writing and publishing short stories
• How luck and maturity played a role in her career as a novelist
• The most underutilized tool in fiction
• Her Zen koan for fellow writers
• And a lot more!

Show Notes:

• I Have Some Questions for You A NOVEL By Rebecca Makkai (Amazon)
• Rebecca Makkai’s Amazon Author Page
• By the Book Interview: Rebecca Makkai - The New York Times
• A Novel That Confronts Our True-Crime Obsession | The New Yorker
• Rebecca Makkai on Facebook
• Rebecca Makkai on Twitter
• Kelton Reid on Twitter

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