Join us on Thursday, February 22, at 7 p.m as we kick off Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival’s first event of 2024 with Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-finalist Rebecca Makkai talking about her New York Times bestseller and “twisty, immersive whodunit” I Have Some Questions for You. Rebecca will be in conversation with award-winning and bestselling author of The Buddha in the Attic and The Swimmers, Julie Otsuka.

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.

“Thought-provoking, deeply unsettling and undeniably riveting…part true-crime page-turner, part campus coming-of-age.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“A great accomplishment. [I Have Some Questions for You] is at once a campus novel, a piercing reflection on the appeal and ethics of the true crime genre, and a story of Me Too reckoning…Exquisitely suspenseful and enormously entertaining.” — Boston Globe

Tickets to hear Rebecca Makkai in person cost $25 and include a signed copy of the book I Have Some Questions for You (value $19). Books will be available for pick up at the event on Thursday February 22, 2024. No early pick-ups from our Festival partner Watchung Booksellers please! Rebecca will be signing books after the event.

This event will be held in The Sanctuary of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Montclair, 67 Church St, Montclair, 07042. If you require any special accommodations to attend, please email montclairliteraryfestival@gmail.com before the event.

Rebecca Makkai is the author of the novel I Have Some Questions for You, The Great Believers, The Hundred-Year House, and The Borrower, and the 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 2022 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. Photo credit © Brett Simison.

Julie Otsuka was born and raised in California. She is a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, and her first novel, When the Emperor Was Divine, won the 2003 Asian American Literary Award and the 2003 American Library Association Alex Award. Her second novel, The Buddha in the Attic, was a finalist for the National Book Award 2011 and won the 2012 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the 2011 Langum Prize in American Historical Fiction. The Buddha in the Attic was an international bestseller and the winner of the prestigious Prix Femina étranger 2012, and the Albatros Literaturpreis 2013. She lives in New York City. Photo credit © Jean-Luc Bertini.

Succeed2gether’s Montclair Literary Festival organizing committee wishes to thank its primary festival partners – Montclair State University, Watchung Booksellers, Montclair Public Library – festival sponsors, event sponsors, our many community supporters and volunteers.

Any proceeds from this event will go to Montclair-based non-profit Succeed2gether, which offers free after-school one-on-one tutoring and enrichment classes with the aim of closing the education and opportunity gaps in Essex County, NJ.