Rebecca Makkai's Reading List

"I finally read "The Door," by Magda Szabo, and it was stunning."

""The Murderess," a fabulous and disturbing novella by the Greek author Alexandros Papadiamantis from the early 1900s. He's foundational to modern Greek literature, and I'm embarrassed that I hadn't heard of him before."

"everyone's out here loving Jennifer Egan and somehow not reading "The Keep," her best and weirdest novel. She gets away with things no one has any right to get away with; that's my favorite kind of book."

"I adore a good boarding school novel. I love "Skippy Dies," by Paul Murray, in part because it shows both faculty life and student life."

""The Virgins," by Pamela Erens, is a brilliant and under-read fever dream of a novel."

"I'm on a mission to remind the world that while Donna Tartt's "The Secret History" is genius, it's about college, not boarding school."

"my father sent me Thornton Wilder's "The Bridge of San Luis Rey" — a book about a Franciscan friar in Peru who sees a rope bridge collapse, killing five people, and then tries to learn about their lives. Wilder was so great at making sense of life and death, and that book healed me."

"I love histories on specific, narrow subjects: "Salt," by Mark Kurlansky."