The Center for Fiction Presents Rebecca Makkai on I Have Some Questions for You with Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Tuesday, 7:00 pm EDT February 21, 2023

The Center for Fiction
& Livestreamed

I have Some Questions for You - Eliana Cohen-Orth

The Ticket/Voucher option includes a $10 Bookstore voucher, redeemable toward the featured event book on the night of the event. All registrants will receive a link to livestream the event.

Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist Rebecca Makkai (The Great Believers) joins The Center for Fiction for the launch of I Have Some Questions for You, named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2023 by TIME, NPR, USA Today, Elle, Newsweek, Salon, Bustle, and more. In this unforgettable novel, film professor and podcaster Bodie Kane is content to forget her tragic past—including the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith—until she is invited back to her old boarding school to teach a class. There, she is inexorably drawn back to the allegedly solved murder case and its increasingly apparent flaws, and falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid. Author Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry (The Orchard) will join Makkai to discuss this riveting, character-driven investigation into collective memory with a transﬁxing mystery at its heart.

In Conversation

Rebecca Makkai

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.

Photo Credit: Brett Simison
Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry

Born in Armenia and raised in Soviet Russia, Kristina Gorcheva-Newberry moved to the U.S. in 1995, after having witnessed perestroika and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Her work appeared in Zyzzyva, Subtropics, Zoetrope: All Story, Joyland, LitHub, Electric Literature, Indiana Review, the Southern Review, Gulf Coast, TriQuarterly, Prairie Schooner, Nimrod, and elsewhere. Kristina is the winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize for Fiction, the Tennessee Williams scholarship from the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, and the Raz/Shumaker Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Fiction for her first collection of stories, What Isn’t Remembered, longlisted for the 2022 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize and shortlisted for the 2022 William Saroyan International Prize. Her debut novel, The Orchard, was published by Ballantine Books last March and included by NY Post among the best books/top 30 must-read titles of the year. The paperback edition is a Penguin Random House Book Club title, forthcoming in March of 2023.

Photo Credit: Ivan Morozov

Featured Book

.

I Have Some Questions for You

By Rebecca Makkai

Published by Viking / Penguin Random House

PURCHASE

A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.

But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent ﬂaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.

In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transﬁxing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.