Politics and Prose- In Conversation with Angie Kim
Rebecca Makkai — I Have Some Questions for You – with Angie Kim — at Conn Ave
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 ?aws. 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 trans?xing 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.
A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.Her last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times‘ Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories.
Makkai will be in conversation with Angie Kim. Kim is a Korean immigrant, former editor of the Harvard Law Review, and author of the international bestseller and Edgar Award winner Miracle Creek, which has been translated into over 20 languages and named a “Best Book of the Year” by Time, The Washington Post, Kirkus, and The Today Show. She has written for The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Vogue, and Glamour, among many others. Her second novel, Happiness Falls, is forthcoming from Hogarth/Random House in September 2023. http://www.AngieKimBooks.com.
About the author:
Rebecca Makkai is the Chicago-based author of the novels The 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.
