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Music for Wartime - Rebecca Makkai - 10/24/2015 - 3:00pm

Music for Wartime

The Bubbler

In Music for Wartime, Makkai brings together a collection of sweeping, powerful, spellbinding stories, three of which under the “legends” section are based on her own family’s history in 1930’s Hungary. A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, while her own relationship is falling apart. Just after the fall of the Berlin Wall, a young boy has a revelation about his father's past when a renowned Romanian violinist who survived a brutal pogrom only to be incarcerated for twenty years by the 'liberating' Communists plays a concert in their home. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women in a village on the brink of utter destruction. In these transporting, wide-ranging, and deeply moving stories, Rebecca Makkai brings to bear the signature mix of intelligence, imagination, and heart for which her novels are so beloved.

Rebecca Makkai

Photo of Rebecca Makkai

Rebecca Makkai’s 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 Los Angeles Times Book Prize; and it was chosen as one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. 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. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.

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