Work
Books
I Have Some Questions For You
Viking
A transfixing mystery and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past More details →
The Great Believers
Penguin Books
A dazzling new novel of friendship and redemption in the face of tragedy and loss set in 1980s Chicago and contemporary Paris. More details →
The Hundred-Year House
Viking/Penguin
The acclaimed author of The Borrower returns with a dazzlingly original, mordantly witty novel about the secrets of an old-money family and their turn-of-the-century estate, Laurelfield. More details →
The Borrower
Penguin Paperback
In Rebecca Makkai’s debut novel, a librarian and a young boy obsessed with reading take to the road. Kirkus Reviews calls The Borrower “smart, literate and refreshingly unsentimental.” More details →
Music For Wartime
Penguin Books
A spellbinding short story collection from a master of the form, the acclaimed author of The Hundred-Year House and The Borrower. More details →New stories in print
The Way You Hold Your Knife
“Ulf, the museum director, whose hand she’d shaken on the way in, who had offered her a sympathetic and conspiratorial nod, announced loudly from the information desk in Danish, then English, that the museum would close in ten minutes. A few people began to leave—the boys with the sneakers followed their parents toward the exit—but there were still twenty people now, maybe thirty, clustering together near the windows, feigning interest in the wall plaques and photos of carnivorous plants.”
The Museum of the Dearly Departed
“There had been a leak.
Deep in the basement and then through the walls and floors of the building, gas had poured, scentless, at two a.m. After the fire trucks and news trucks and gawkers had dispersed, after one body had been sirened away and eleven more secreted out under sheets, the building sat empty for a week. The only survivor died in the hospital, never having woken. All twelve of them, that meant, died in their sleep. There had been no calls to 911, no bodies sprawled halfway to the door—just the mailman’s cry for help the next morning after three poisonous minutes at the lobby mailboxes. Despite the earnest reporters’ enunciation of “deadliest” and “perfect storm,” the public was not as horrified as it pretended. “That’s really the way to go,” people murmured to their TVs.
On the eighth day, the hottest of July, the old Hungarian couple returned from Cleveland and stood staring at the yellow tape, suitcases by their sides, taxi waiting to be paid. They hadn’t heard.”
K-I-S-S-I-N-G
“It was like watching a soccer ball fall through tree branches. It was guaranteed to reach the ground, but how soon and what path it would take to get there were both unpredictable and completely irrelevant. The point was that the ball would hit the earth, and there you’d be.
And there they were, on the bed, her sarong on the floor, his fingers down the front of her bikini bottom and then up, inside her. Her mouth hitting his like a magnet. Her legs locked around his back.”
Everything We Know about the Bomber
“He was on the FBI’s radar, and then he was not. He was someone’s son, and then he was not. He had a girlfriend, and then he did not. He had a beard, and then he did not. His sister understood him, and then she did not.”
Our Plastic-American Brethren
“Kurt enjoyed picturing their shock, the dim-witted thieves, as they unzipped the black canvas bags. Right about now they’d be squatting on the floor of some desolate apartment with Ziplocs of marijuana on the coffee table and a broken TV. One of them, most likely named Cletus, spreads the flaps and sees, gaping up, the putty-colored face, the serenely closed eyes, the plastic sheeting vomiting forth from the O-shaped mouth of a Plastic-American brother, and he, Cletus, screams like a little girl, or like the junkie he is.”
The November Story
“Markus is a gifted crier. We just say, “Tell us how your grandfather would feel,” and he gushes like Miss America. “My grandfather would be so proud of me,” he says, and blows a kiss to the sky.
Or we ask if he feels that his whole life has been a struggle. He says, “I just feel like my whole life has been just this huge struggle,” and then he starts snorting and choking and holds up a finger.
The producers love the criers, and they love the cocky bastards, and they love the snarky gay men. The others, we try to get drunk. We flirt with the straight guys, if there are any. If necessary, we feed them lines.
Peter Torrelli, Falling Apart
“ When Carlos asked why I would risk my whole career for Peter Torrelli, I told him he had to understand that in those last three years of high school, Peter and I were the only two gay boys in Chicago. Because I really believed it, back then, and twenty-five years of experience proving otherwise was nothing in the face of that original muscle memory: me and Peter side by side on the hard pew during chapel, not listening, washed blind by the sun from the high windows, breathing in sync. It didn’t matter that we weren’t close anymore, I told Carlos. The point was, he’d been my first love. I’d never actually loved him, but still, listen, believe me, there’s another kind of first love.
Painted Ocean, Painted Ship
The Best American Short Stories 2010 →
“ What she hadn’t been able to describe really to anyone about that day in Tumby Bay was the sublimity, the blinding beauty of that bird as it flew, and as it lay where it fell. She could bring back in an instant that moment of white light rising beyond the leaves, her hand shaking against the gun. The echo of the shot seeming to come first because her ears went dead, then the load roar as they woke again. The flapping and cracking as something fell down through the trees, branch by snapping branch.
Stories Online
The Plaza
In both 1946 and 1947, Margie Bixby was crowned Trout Queen of the Upper Delaware River, an honor she lost in 1948 only because it wouldn’t do for the daughter of the newspaper editor—the editor of the paper that sponsored the pageant—to win three times.
Read an interview I did about this story in The New Yorker here!
Women Corinne Does Not Actually Know
the professor of archaeology
In the small Southern town where Corinne has rented an apartment for the summer, she has found a yoga studio. It’s quainter than her usual one in Boston. At home, the women are lasered and sanded, the leggings sleek, the yoga competitive. To this place, which is above a tech-help center, people wear cargo shorts and baggy T-shirts. They pay by leaving cash or a personal check in a basket, register by signing a spiral notebook. They say oof as they bend. Corinne always unrolls her mat in the back corner, tries not to interlope.
A Story for Your Daughters, a Story for Your Sons
The war had closed much of the city, cut off many of the smaller towns. Unable to trace his usual routes, the hat merchant headed into the mountains to try his luck. His father, before he died, had circled a small mountain village on his map, had noted that the trading was good but the trip took two difficult days. Indeed, the snaking road narrowed fast, and the bridge was down to splinters so his horse had to wade to the knees.
The November Story
An edited version of “The November Story,” which originally appeared in Crazyhorse, was featured on This American Life in August, 2011. You can listen to the whole thing if you click the link. Yes, this is my voice. No, it isn’t a true story. No, I didn’t get to meet Ira. Yes, recording this is the coolest thing I’ve ever gotten to do.
Dead Turtle
Maggie assumed it was her fault: that if she’d gotten there a minute earlier, she’d have seen him waggle his stumps, seen him fall eerily still, and she could have knocked on his shell and startled him back to life.
Cross
“He had wedged his thigh between her legs, and she felt her feet leave the earth, felt the dampness of the building soak through the back of her dress. Gravity rearranged itself so that leaning back against the theater’s slippery verticality was enough to keep from floating off into the night.”
The George Spelvin Players
Barnes Harlow was actually Jason something, but no one dreamed of calling him that. He was Barnes Harlow when he was robbed of the Daytime Emmy, he was Barnes Harlow all twelve years he played Dalton Shaw, Esq., and he was Barnes Harlow when, in that guise, he married Silvia Romero Caldwell Blake, poisoned his mother-in-law, opened a restaurant, burned down that restaurant, was drugged by Michaela, and saved the Whitney family from carbon monoxide poisoning.
The Way You Hold Your Knife
“Ulf, the museum director, whose hand she’d shaken on the way in, who had offered her a sympathetic and conspiratorial nod, announced loudly from the information desk in Danish, then English, that the museum would close in ten minutes. A few people began to leave—the boys with the sneakers followed their parents toward the exit—but there were still twenty people now, maybe thirty, clustering together near the windows, feigning interest in the wall plaques and photos of carnivorous plants.”
Wedding Night
“I’m seventeen years old, sitting with Randy Osterman on his picnic bench. He’s got his dad’s binoculars trained on the bride, but I’m watching the couple in the gazebo stare out across the lake and garden. You can tell they’re talking about the wedding, how expensive and lovely and delicious, what an unusual location. She hands him her champagne glass so she can reach her hand under the hem of her bright pink dress and fix her slip.
“It’s Alright, It’s Alright, It’s Alright”
The day she turned 34, Catherine received, through her agent, a typewritten letter from Rudy Upchurch, who’d seen her onstage in Travesties. “You might be familiar with my movies,” it began, an understatement for the ages. No need to audition; he simply wanted her in London for filming. Catherine had been hired on sight before — when a director wanted wavy red hair, she was a shoo-in — but that was in her teenage days of soap opera bits.
