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Magic City Books Presents: Virtual Event – Kevin Brockmeier In Conversation with Rebecca Makkai

Magic City Books is proud to welcome Kevin Brockmeier for a virtual author event in celebration of his new collection of stories, The Ghost Variations. 

The author of the acclaimed novel The Brief History of the Dead now gives us one hundred funny, poignant, scary, and thought-provoking ghost stories that explore all aspects of the afterlife. These tales are by turns playful, chilling, and philosophical, paying homage to the genre while audaciously subverting expectations. The ghosts in these pages are certain to haunt you well after you’ve closed the book.

Kevin will be joined in conversation by Rebecca Makkai, author of The Great Believers.

This free event will be hosted on the Zoom platform and Facebook Live. To register in advance for the Zoom event visit: https://magiccitybooks.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_YUhZ3OLOR1arH2OuetXH7g.

After you register you will receive a confirmation email with instructions on how to join the event on Friday, March 12.

The Ghost Variations will be published on March 9, 2021. To pre-order a copy you can call Magic City Books, 918-602-4452 or visit: https://magiccitybooks.square.site/product/the-ghost-variations/437.

About The Ghost Variations

Ghost stories tap into our most primal emotions as they encourage us to confront the timeless question: What comes after death? Here, in tales that are by turn scary, funny, philosophic, and touching, you’ll find that question sharpened, split, reconsidered–and met with a multitude of answers.

A spirit who is fated to spend eternity reliving the exact moment she lost her chance at love, ghostly trees that haunt the occupant of a wooden house, specters that snatch anyone who steps into the shadows, and parakeets that serve as mouthpieces for the dead: these are just a few of the characters in this extraordinary compendium of one hundred ghost stories. Kevin Brockmeier’s fiction has always explored the space between the fantastical and the everyday with profundity and poignancy. As in his previous books, The Ghost Variations discovers new ways of looking at who we are and what matters to us, exploring how mysterious, sad, strange, and comical it is to be alive–or, as it happens, not to be.

KEVIN BROCKMEIER is the author of the memoir A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip; the novels The Illumination, The Brief History of the Dead, and The Truth About Celia; the story collections The Ghost Variations, Things That Fall from the Sky and The View from the Seventh Layer; and the children’s novels City of Names and Grooves: A Kind of Mystery. His work has been translated into seventeen languages. He teaches frequently at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and lives in Little Rock, Arkansas, where he was raised.

on March 12 2021· Tagged: , , , , ,

Gorton’s Masterclass Series: Rebecca Makkai – A Local Writing Life

This event is virtual

“A Local Writing Life”: Local author Rebecca Makkai has achieved national prominence, most recently with her novel The Great Believers — a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal. Makkai was born and raised in Lake Bluff, and has lived her adult life in Lake Forest. She will talk with Barry Benson, Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, about living as a professional writer in Lake Forest, coming of age in the community, sustaining a life in the arts, and the connections of her four books to both the North Shore and Chicago.

Rebecca Makkai’s latest 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 LA Times Book Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award; 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. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Barry Benson is the Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, a nonprofit artists’ community located on the former country estate of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. Nearly 200 residencies and fellowships are now offered annually to creative professionals of all types, making Ragdale one of the largest interdisciplinary artists’ communities in the country. Ragdale residents represent a cross-section of ages, cultures, experience, and mediums, for a diverse and vibrant community.

By purchasing a ticket, you will receive a link to the masterclass which will be released February 25th and sales will run through April 9th.  The link is yours to watch at your convenience.

($25 tickets/$10 for students)

on March 11 2021· Tagged: , , , ,

Unabridged Bookstore Presents: Zak Salih’s Virtual Tour for “LET’S GET BACK TO THE PARTY” in conversation with Rebecca Makkai

It is 2015, weeks after the Supreme Court marriage equality ruling, and all Sebastian Mote wants is to settle down. A high school art history teacher, newly single and desperately lonely, he envies his queer students their freedom to live openly the youth he lost to fear and shame.

When he runs into his childhood friend Oscar Burnham at a wedding in Washington, D.C., he can’t help but see it as a second chance. Now thirty-five, the men haven’t seen each other in more than a decade. But Oscar has no interest in their shared history, nor in the sense of be­longing Sebastian craves. Instead, he’s outraged by what he sees as the death of gay culture: bars overrun with bachelorette parties, friends cou­pling off and having babies. For Oscar, confor­mity isn’t peace, it’s surrender.

While Oscar and Sebastian struggle to find their place in a rapidly changing world, each is drawn into a cross-generational friendship that treads the line between envy and obsession: Se­bastian with one of his students, Oscar with an older icon of the AIDS era. And as they collide again and again, both men must reckon not just with one another but with themselves.

Zak Salih lives in Washington, D.C. His writing has appeared in Crazyhorse, the Chattahoochee Review, the Millions, the Rumpus, and other publications. This is his first novel.

Rebecca Makkai will be joining Zak Salih to celebrate the release of Let’s Get Back To The Party.

To participate in this virtual event, sign up here. To purchase Let’s Get Back to the Party, begin an order here.

on March 4 2021· Tagged: , , , , ,

Gorton’s Masterclass Series: Rebecca Makkai – A Local Writing Life

This event is virtual

“A Local Writing Life”: Local author Rebecca Makkai has achieved national prominence, most recently with her novel The Great Believers — a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal. Makkai was born and raised in Lake Bluff, and has lived her adult life in Lake Forest. She will talk with Barry Benson, Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, about living as a professional writer in Lake Forest, coming of age in the community, sustaining a life in the arts, and the connections of her four books to both the North Shore and Chicago.

Rebecca Makkai’s latest 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 LA Times Book Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award; 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. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Barry Benson is the Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, a nonprofit artists’ community located on the former country estate of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. Nearly 200 residencies and fellowships are now offered annually to creative professionals of all types, making Ragdale one of the largest interdisciplinary artists’ communities in the country. Ragdale residents represent a cross-section of ages, cultures, experience, and mediums, for a diverse and vibrant community.

By purchasing a ticket, you will receive a link to the masterclass which will be released February 25th and sales will run through April 9th.  The link is yours to watch at your convenience.

($25 tickets/$10 for students)

on March 4 2021· Tagged: , , , ,

Gorton’s Masterclass Series: Rebecca Makkai – A Local Writing Life

This event is virtual

“A Local Writing Life”: Local author Rebecca Makkai has achieved national prominence, most recently with her novel The Great Believers — a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, and the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal. Makkai was born and raised in Lake Bluff, and has lived her adult life in Lake Forest. She will talk with Barry Benson, Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, about living as a professional writer in Lake Forest, coming of age in the community, sustaining a life in the arts, and the connections of her four books to both the North Shore and Chicago.

Rebecca Makkai’s latest 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 LA Times Book Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award; 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. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Barry Benson is the Interim Executive Director of the Ragdale Foundation, a nonprofit artists’ community located on the former country estate of architect Howard Van Doren Shaw. Nearly 200 residencies and fellowships are now offered annually to creative professionals of all types, making Ragdale one of the largest interdisciplinary artists’ communities in the country. Ragdale residents represent a cross-section of ages, cultures, experience, and mediums, for a diverse and vibrant community.

By purchasing a ticket, you will receive a link to the masterclass which will be released February 25th and sales will run through April 9th.  The link is yours to watch at your convenience.

($25 tickets/$10 for students)

on February 25 2021· Tagged: , , , , ,

Virtual Book Launch: THE UPSTAIRS HOUSE by Julia Fine In Conversation With Rebecca Makkai

Join us on Women & Children First’s Crowdcast Channel for the virtual launch celebration for The Upstairs House by Julia Fine! For this event, Fine will be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai.

REGISTER HERE

Ravaged and sore from giving birth to her first child, Megan is mostly raising her newborn alone while her husband travels for work. Physically exhausted and mentally drained, she’s also wracked with guilt over her unfinished dissertation—a thesis on mid-century children’s literature.

Enter a new upstairs neighbor: the ghost of quixotic children’s book writer Margaret Wise Brown—author of the beloved classic Goodnight Moon—whose existence no one else will acknowledge. It seems Margaret has unfinished business with her former lover, the once-famous socialite and actress Michael Strange, and is determined to draw Megan into the fray. As Michael joins the haunting, Megan finds herself caught in the wake of a supernatural power struggle—and until she can find a way to quiet these spirits, she and her newborn daughter are in terrible danger.

Using Megan’s postpartum haunting as a powerful metaphor for a woman’s fraught relationship with her body and mind, Julia Fine once again delivers an imaginative and “barely restrained, careful musing on female desire, loneliness, and hereditary inheritances” (Washington Post).

Julia Fine is the author of the critically acclaimed What Should Be Wild, which was shortlisted for the Bram Stoker Superior First Novel Award and the Chicago Review of Books Award. She teaches writing in Chicago, where she lives with her husband and son.

Rebecca Makkai latest 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 LA Times Book Prize, the Clark Fiction Prize, the Midwest Independent Booksellers Award, and the Chicago Review of Books Award; 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. Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada College and Northwestern University. She is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

Event date:
Wednesday, February 24, 2021 – 7:00pm
Event address:
Virtual via Crowdcast

on February 24 2021· Tagged: , , , , , , , ,

PEN Out Loud: Brandon Hobson with Rebecca Makkai

Flash sale until January 27! Use the code WINTERPOL for 50 percent off General Admission tickets.
The first 350 Admission With Book tickets will include a bookplate.

National Book Award finalist Brandon Hobson joins PEN Out Loud to celebrate his latest novel, The Removed. Weaving together multiple first-person narrators and Cherokee folklore, the novel tells the story of a Cherokee family 15 years after an unjust police shooting of one of the family’s three children. Hobson will be joined in conversation with Pulitzer Prize finalist Rebecca Makkai to discuss the novel and its “meditation on family, grief, home, and the power of stories on both a personal and ancestral level.”

This digital event will start at 8pm ET / 5pm PT.

Presented in collaboration with Strand Book Store and Scripps Presents.

Strand Book Store logoScripps Presents logo

ASL interpretive services are provided by ProBono ASL.

 

PEN Out Loud focuses on amplifying diverse voices and convening vital conversations with authors, poets, journalists, artists, and activists.

This winter, these conversations shift our focus inward, providing a necessary pause to examine who we once were, who we are now, and who we’d like to become. Following a fraught year in which we were challenged to reckon with our past, confront our present, and reimagine our future, we turn to literature to engage our minds and reconnect with ourselves—physically, mentally, and emotionally.

Each event this season explores the core of our humanity, generously interrogating our understanding of—and capacity to experience—passion and desire, grief and resilience, nourishment and love, reflection and hope.

$20 General Admission*
* Admission with books, signed books, and bookplates available at additional cost.

on February 16 2021· Tagged: , , , , , , , , ,

StoryStudio Chicago Presents: The Geek-Out Book Club | Rebecca Makkai + Cristina Henriquez Discuss “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson

The Geek-Out is writers geeking out about literature, plain and simple! One writer will make the other read something for the first time (in this case, Rebecca made Cristina read Shirley Jackson’s legendarily unnerving “The Lottery”) and then for about an hour they talk together about craft, impact, what they loved, what they didn’t. The audience is encouraged to read the piece too, and participate via the chat box.

The event is a fundraiser for StoryStudio’s Doro Boehme scholarship fund, benefiting writers working on book-length projects. If this first go is successful, we hope to make The Geek-Out a regular series, inviting your favorite writers to participate and discuss other legendary stories and books.

on December 14 2020· Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Lincolnwood Library Virtual Event

Join the Lincolnwood Public Library as we welcome Pulitzer-nominated author of The Great Believers, Rebecca Makkai.

This program is being offered using Zoom, a virtual presentation/conferencing software. Please include your email address to receive instructions on how to join the Zoom event.

on September 30 2020· Tagged: ,

Virtual Book Launch Party: THE TALENTED MISS FARWELL by Emily Gray Tedrowe (Presented by Women & Children First)

Join Women & Children First for the virtual launch party for The Talented Miss Farwell by Emily Gray Tedrowe. For this event, Emily will be in conversation with Rebecca Makkai. This event will be streamed on Women & Children First’s Crowdcast channel.

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on September 29 2020· Tagged: , , , , ,

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