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Published Jun 2015
240 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
Rebecca Makkai's first two novels, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, have established her as one of the freshest and most imaginative voices in fiction. Now, the award-winning writer, whose stories have appeared in four consecutive editions of The Best American Short Stories, returns with a highly anticipated collection bearing her signature mix of intelligence, wit, and heart.
A reality show producer manipulates two contestants into falling in love, even as her own relationship falls 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 plays a concert in their home. When the prized elephant of a traveling circus keels over dead, the small-town minister tasked with burying its remains comes to question his own faith. In an unnamed country, a composer records the folk songs of two women from a village on the brink of destruction.
These transporting, deeply moving stories—some inspired by her own family history—amply demonstrate Makkai's extraordinary range as a storyteller, and confirm her as a master of the short story form.
"Starred Review. Outstanding ...Though these stories alternate in time between WWII and the present day, they all are set ... within 'the borders of the human heart'—a terrain that their author maps uncommonly well." - Publishers Weekly
"Music for Wartime shows off Rebecca Makkai's surprising range of short-story writing: Stories of war and destruction appear next to those about love and reality television. Yet the collection still manages to feel like a cohesive, stunning whole, tied together with the wit and heart that courses through each and every story." - Buzzfeed, "17 Awesome New Books You Need To Read This Summer"
"Spanning Berlin, Romania and present-day America, where true love can be found in front of a live audience, her short stories are as moving as they are varied." - The Huffington Post, "18 Brilliant Books You Won't Want To Miss This Summer"
"Makkai's first short story collection demonstrates why the already-acclaimed novelist is also a master of this more succinct form. Each of the stories in the collection is vividly wrought and individually compelling, and features a precision and beauty that leaves the reader full of wonder." - The L Magazine, "50 Books You'll Want to Read This Spring and Summer"
"Showcases the author's talent for the short form." - The Millions, "Most Anticipated: The Great First-Half 2015 Book Preview"
"Rebecca Makkai is one of our best writers—witty and precise, brilliant and compassionate—and every one of these stories contains all the depth and heartache of a doorstop-sized novel. I've been waiting for years for this book. Music for Wartime isn't simply wonderful—it's essential." - Molly Antopol, author of The Un-Americans, longlisted for the National Book Award
"I have been waiting for this collection since 2008, when I read "The Worst You Ever Feel" and it basically took the top of my head off. Deeply intelligent, stylistically playful, full of razor wit and grave historical accounting, what is most enthralling about these stories is their insistence that the political and the personal are never separate categories, that art's attempt to make sense of the senseless is at least as noble as it is doomed, and that atrocities large and small begin, as love does, in the human heart." - Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted
This information about Music for Wartime was first featured
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 LA Times Book Prize; 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. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of Sierra Nevada University and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago. Her novel I Have Some Questions for You was published in 2023.
Link to Rebecca Makkai's Website
Name Pronunciation
Rebecca Makkai: mac-EYE
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