The portable Veblen

"A young couple on the brink of marriage--the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist--find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other's dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an int...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: McKenzie, Elizabeth, 1958- (Author)
Format: Books Print Book
Language:English
Published: New York : Penguin Press, 2016.
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Summary:"A young couple on the brink of marriage--the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist--find their engagement in danger of collapse. Along the way they weather everything from each other's dysfunctional families, to the attentions of a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, to an intimate tête-à-tête with a very charismatic squirrel. Veblen (named after the iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen, who coined the term "conspicuous consumption") is one of the most refreshing heroines in recent fiction. Not quite liberated from the burdens of her hypochondriac, narcissistic mother and her institutionalized father, Veblen is an amateur translator and "freelance self"; in other words, she's adrift. Meanwhile, Paul--the product of good hippies who were bad parents--finds his ambition soaring. His medical research has led to the development of a device to help minimize battlefield brain trauma--an invention that gets him swept up in a high-stakes deal with the Department of Defense, a Bizarro World that McKenzie satirizes with granular specificity"--
Physical Description:430 pages ; 22 cm
ISBN:9781594206856
1594206856
Author Notes:Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of 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 appeared in The New Yorker , The Atlantic Monthly , Best American Nonrequired Reading , and the Pushcart Prize anthology, and has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts . She was an NEA/Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic , and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford's school of continuing studies.