Rebecca Makkai's first story, at the age of three, was printed on the side of a cardboard box and told from the viewpoint of her stuffed Smurf doll. More recently, her stories have been anthologized in
The Best American Short Stories 2008,
2009, and
2010, and she has been chosen by Geraldine Brooks for
The Best American Short Stories 2011. Her stories have also appeared in
Tin House,
Ploughshares,
The Threepenny Review, and on Public Radio's
Selected Shorts. She lives in Chicago with her husband and two daughters.
Her debut novel
The Borrower is out now from Viking.
From Makkai's Q & A with Sabra Wineteer for The Millions:
TM: Both this novel and most of your short stories are political. What are the difficulties in writing politically charged fiction?
RM: I don’t find it difficult so much as unavoidable. It’s funny, even when I think I’m writing a very apolitical piece (because it’s not directly about politics or revolution), it will end up being about race or class. You’d think I’d be a loudly political person in real life, but really I limit myself to voting and occasionally talking back to NPR when I’m alone in the car. And maybe that’s just what my stories will always be about, whether I want it or not – in the way that a Roth story is always about sex and a John Irving story is always about dismemberment and bears.
I think that whether I’m writing about a revolution or a bomb shelter or a public library, what I’m drawn to is the power structure – who’s in charge, who’s being oppressed, who’s working their way up that ladder. There’s a lot of drama inherent in that, and it’s not so much that I have a political ax to grind as that this is where I tend to find the story.
I do think that if someone sets out to write fiction just to prove a certain political point, though, it becomes unbearable. It’s why I can’t stand Tolstoy. I think politics can be the subject, but not the point.
Read
the complete interview.
Learn more about the author and her work at
Rebecca Makkai's website.
My Book, The Movie: The Borrower.
--Marshal Zeringue