Rebecca Makkai's first story, at the age of three, was printed on the side of a cardboard box and told from the viewpoint of her stuffed Smurf doll. Sadly, her fiction has never since reached such heights of experimentalism. She holds an MA from Middlebury College's Bread Loaf School of English, where she studied writing with Paul Muldoon and David Huddle, and a BA from Washington and Lee University, where she studied under Dabney Stuart and Heather Ross Miller, and where she was a student assistant at the literary magazine Shenandoah. Favorite writers, dead, living, and immortal, include Nabokov, Alice Munro, Charlotte Bronte, Marquez, Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Flaubert, Dickens, Austen, Steve Almond, Michael Chabon, Tom Stoppard, Jonathan Safran Foer, Richard Russo, Barbara Kingsolver, Ian McEwan, Oscar Wilde, David Sedaris, and the children’s writer Lois Lowry. She lives north of Chicago with her husband and daughter and big, slobbery dog. "What was wrong with getting out? It was the same thing Morgenstern the pianist must have done, moving his piano across town, never walking by the jail, and even Radelescu had saved himself in that little building from the gunshots that killed the women and rounded the men onto the Death Train. And so what was wrong with getting out? Except that escaping is its own brand of pain, and tied to you always are the strings of the souls that didn't save themselves." – From "The Worst You Ever Feel," originally printed in Shenandoah, chosen by Salman Rushdie for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories 2008 "He took a lover in the city and told her he was a professor of physics. He showed her the stars in the sky and explained that they circled the Earth, along with the Sun. That's not true at all, she said. You tease me because you think I'm a silly girl. No, he said and touched her neck, You are the only one who might understand. The universe has been folded inside out." – From "The Briefcase," first printed in New England Review, anthologized in The Best American Short Stories 2009 and The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009 "I've been calling him Bach so far, at least in my head, but now that he's started wearing my ex-husband's clothes and learned to work the coffeemaker, I feel it's time to start calling him Johann." – From "Couple of Lovers on a Red Background," printed in Brilliant Corners, reprinted in Best American Fantasy 3