Short stories by Rebecca Makkai
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novelsThe Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, as well as the short story collection Music for Wartime. The Great Believers was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and received the ALA Carnegie Medal and the LA Times Book Prize, among other honors. Makkai is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University, and she is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
Listing 6 stories.
A retired teacher looks back on her teaching career. She focuses on one incident in which a troubled child killed a school pet and wonders if she made the right choice in turning the child in to her parents.
After an assistant professor mistakes an endangered albatross for a duck and kills it, she reevaluates how she perceives others and how others perceive her as the assumptions she makes about others threaten her job and her marriage.
A gay man living in Chicago and working for special events at NPR puts his job—and failing relationship—on the line when he offers his best friend from high school an acting job, knowing that his friend has lost all ability to act.
In an unspecified country destroyed by war, a former chef-turned-political prisoner escapes his chains and steals the identity of a physics professor.
A young boy with the supernatural ability to see ghosts and understand complex histories watches his father's violin teacher perform and envisions his tragic past in 1940's Romania during the pogroms.
When a woman from Boston goes to a small Southern town for a summer, she begins to reflect on the women she encounters, both in front of her and online, imagining their private lives and how they navigate the constant sexualization of woman- and girlhood.