story collection Music for Wartime. A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award, The Great Believers received an American Library Association Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, among other honors, and was named one of the Ten Best Books of 2018 by The New York Times. A 202 Guggenheim fellow, Makkai is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is the artistic director of StoryStudio Chicago. She lives on the campus of the midwestern boarding school where her husband teaches, and in Vermont.
[My Book, The Movie: The Borrower; The Page 69 Test: The Hundred-Year House; My Book, The Movie: The Hundred-Year House; My Book, The Movie: The Great Believers]
At the Waterstones blog Makkai tagged five favorite novels that bring characters together in an educational setting, including:
The Interestings by Meg WolitzerRead about the other entries on the list.
I might be cheating a bit here, but I do consider Meg Wolitzer’s 2014 The Interestings to be a campus novel.Yes, it’s set at a summer camp for the performing arts rather than at an accredited academic institution, but we still have a limited cast of characters coming of age together on an isolated patch of land. Camp, campus — what’s the difference? We follow three camp friends from the 1970s to the 2010s, asking what promises and curses we carry with us from adolescence. That a novel this long and this character-driven and realist can still be propulsive is a testament to the way Wolitzer imbues everyday moments with their full importance.
The Interestings is among Sabrina Rojas Weiss's five novels ripe for adapting as a TV series.
--Marshal Zeringue
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