Author: Rebecca Makkai

1) First, smell it. Look at the new arrivals, lined up like candy. See if, for one second, you can remember what it was like to walk into a bookstore as a reader. Just a reader, a happy, curious reader. With no agenda, no insecurities, no history of bookstores as scenes of personal failure and…

I have favorite books. And then I have favorite books, as in, the objects themselves, the ones made weird and irreplaceable by the extra markings in or on them—the annotations, the inscriptions, the love notes. When people ask for my “favorites,” this is the list I actually want to give. Item #1: Ken Kesey’s One…

I once heard a story about John Cleese, of Monty Python fame, contributing a lunch date to a silent auction. And my first thought was, “This is one of the most generous things that man could possibly do.” Not because it took tremendous time or energy, but because how many times a day does someone…

It’s eerie to open your email and find a message from one of your characters. It’s downright surreal when he threatens to sue you. A few years ago, I published a story in Tin House which (for reasons that should be clear later) I’ll refer to here just as “Peter T_____, Falling Apart.” The story…

Oh, television (they sighed collectively). Enemy of productivity, demise of the would-be genius. “Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,” we cry, “some Cromwell ruined by The Real Housewives of Atlanta.” But why, then, have I learned almost as much about writing from reality TV in the past five years as from my collections of…