Rebecca's first novel, The Borrower, will be published in the summer of 2011 by Viking Press, an imprint of Penguin. The book will also appear from Windmill (Random House) in the UK and Australia, and from other publishers in France, Italy, Germany and Portugal.
"Painted Ocean, Painted Ship," from the December, 2009 issue of Ploughshares, will appear in The Best American Short Stories 2010, guest edited by Richard Russo. This will be Rebecca's third consecutive appearance in that anthology.  Read the story online here, and her entry for the Ploughshares blog here.
Look for new stories in Crazyhorse this fall and Tin House in December!
Rebecca was recently awarded Shenandoah's Goodheart Prize for fiction, judged by Speer Morgan, for her story "Exit, Pursued." The prize awards the best fiction published in that magazine's volume year.
The Best American Short Stories 2009, featuring Rebecca's story "The Briefcase," is available from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Alice Sebold made the selections. Read the story online here (but please also buy the anthology, which is especially strong this year). The same story also appears in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, edited by Dave Eggers.
"The Briefcase" was read by actor Victor Garber at Symphony Space in New York City on October 7th, as part of the Selected Shorts series presented by Public Radio International. You can listen to Rebecca's full interview with host Isaiah Sheffer, part of which was aired on various NPR and PRI stations, here.
Rebecca was recently asked by Writers Read to blog about what she's been reading lately. Here's what she wrote.
"Couple of Lovers on a Red Background," first published last summer in Brilliant Corners, was selected by guest editor Kevin Brockmeier for Best American Fantasy (Underland Press). The book is available now.

From the introduction by Kevin Brockmeier:

"And there are stories in which ordinary people are confronted with the fantastic and use its mechanisms to understand their own histories, such as ... Rebecca Makkai's teasingly yearning composer-out-of-time fable. (Makkai's story "The Briefcase," by the way, was bar none the finest non-fantasy story I read this year: Seek it out.)"

Before its selection for The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2009, "The Briefcase" was discussed by that anthology's lovely teenaged editorial board. Read a transcript of the discussion here.

In her personal life, she is perfecting the art of toddler-wrangling.