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Mohrbooks Literary Agency
Sebastian Ritscher |
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THE PORTABLE VEBLEN
This intellectual love story is about a young woman engaged to an ambitious neurologist, whose romance is vexed by her hypochondriacal mother, his brush with a corrupt pharmaceutical company, and one interfering squirrel.
THE PORTABLE VEBLEN is a social novel with an undercurrent of magical thinking. It resurrects the figure of Thorstein Veblen, a progressive economist (1857-1929) whose critiques of modern materialism remain timely. This cranky quasi-hermit is a presiding spirit over this unusual novel.
THE PORTABLE VEBLEN asks: how do we love our families without completely surrendering our own identities and desires? And how do we stay true to our ideals while coping with the exigencies of modern life?
Elizabeth McKenzie received a Sustainable Arts grant based on a section of the novel: "Elizabeth McKenzie’s THE PORTABLE VEBLEN might be the most surprising love story we have ever read. Set in present-day California, the novel introduces us to a young woman--the title character--who is newly engaged to an ambitious Stanford neurologist researching battlefield traumatic brain injury. As in many love stories, the young couple's idiosyncratic and demanding families play a meddling role; unlike most love stories, so do a family of squirrels, as well as the memory of 19th century economist Thorstein Veblen.”
Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of two previous books published by Random House: a collection, STOP THAT GIRL, short-listed for The Story Prize, and the novel MACGREGOR TELLS THE WORLD, a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. Her work has also appeared in Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts.
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Book
Published 2016-01-19 by Penguin Press |