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Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of The Dog of the North, published in March 2023 from Penguin Press. Her novel The Portable Veblen was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for fiction, winner of the California Book Award, and finalist for the Baileys Prize. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize Anthology, and recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. Her collection, Stop That Girl, was short-listed for The Story Prize, and her novel MacGregor Tells the World was a Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and Library Journal Best Book of the year. She is the senior editor of the Chicago Quarterly Review and the managing editor of Catamaran.
Elizabeth McKenzie's website
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What compelled you to write this book?
For a long time I'd been thinking of writing a comic novel about two people who want to be together but whose families are very irritating and definitely getting in the way. But at the same time, a close family member went into treatment for a serious illness and entered a clinical trial, and it didn't go well. I was angry that it didn't go well and also angry about my misunderstanding of the purpose of the trial, and being angry about something is always a very good place to start writing.
Who is Thorstein Veblen? Why did you become interested in him, and what are his ties to Palo Alto?
Thorstein Veblen was a utopian anarchist primarily known as an economist and sociologist, coiner of the term "conspicuous consumption." But his writings were extensive on an amazing number of topics, and the biographical details of his life, as a misunderstood outsider, really endear him to me. He taught at Stanford for several years and bought an odd lot up the old La Honda Road in the Santa Cruz Mountains, not too far from where I live, and perched a discarded chicken coop on the ridge. For years after his dismissal at Stanford, he...
Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestseller The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and a Governor General's Literary Award. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Betty Trask Award, was short-listed ... (more)
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The Portable Veblen
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Patrick deWitt is the author of the critically acclaimed Ablutions: Notes for a Novel, as well as The Sisters Brothers, which was short-listed for the Booker Prize, French Exit and The Librarianist. Born in British Columbia, ... (more)
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The Portable Veblen
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