Six Bridges Book Festival: Rebecca Makkai & Curtis Sittenfeld

Six Bridges Book Festival: Rebecca Makkai & Curtis Sittenfeld

New York Times bestseller I Have Some Questions for You is Rebecca Makkai’s 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.

In Curtis Sittenfeld’s Romantic Comedy, Sally Milz is a sketch writer for a live comedy show that airs each Saturday night. When pop music sensation Noah Brewster appears as a musical guest, Sally hits it off with him instantly and sparks seem to fly. But he’s out of her league and this isn’t a romantic comedy—it’s real life…right?

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For more information about this event, or the Six Bridges Book Festival, please call 501-918-3000.

on September 27 2023· Tagged: arkansas, central arkansas library system, Curtis Sittenfeld, free, in conversation, six bridges, virtual, Webinar

Electric Lit Presents: The Craft of Covid in Fiction

The dynamic, unpredictable nature of the pandemic has forced novelists to become pundits, predicting what the world will look like when their novels are published.

They also face unique craft challenges: how do masks affect dialogue, character descriptions, and scene? How do social distancing and quarantine warp relationship dynamics?

Rebecca Makkai chose to move the events of I Have Some Questions for You to 2018, but still had to negotiate Covid protocol for courtroom scenes set in 2022. The protagonist of Weike Wang’s Joan Is Okay is an emergency room doctor in New York City; when Covid hit, Wang revised the novel to feature overwhelmed hospitals. A deadly flu ravages the globe in Phase Six by Jim Shepard, and the lessons of the Covid pandemic are in the distant past.

These three novelists will discuss the drafting and revision process of their novels and explain how they tackled the ever-changing question of how Covid should factor into their work.  Moderated by Halimah Marcus.

This year’s Masquerade of the Red Death is celebrating excellence in pandemic fiction with special guests and book giveaways at our party in Brooklyn on Friday, October 21, as well as related virtual salons. This salon is free for Masquerade ticket-holders*, $10 for the general public, and $5 for EL members.

*Masquerade ticket holders will receive an email with a discount code to register for free.

on October 6 2022· Tagged: crowdcast, digital event, Electric Lit, Electric Literature, online, online event, online workshop, Rebecca Makkai, salon, virtual workshop, Webinar, workshop, zoom