Elizabeth Mckenzie

With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of THE PARADISE PROBLEM and THE LOVE HYPOTHESISChemistry teacher Ashleigh Hutchinson knows better than anyone that love and lust don’t mix. The feelings come from different hormones, they trigger different responses, and they demand different reactions. Which is why she doesn’t date. She hooks up. No catching feelings required. When Ashleigh is fired from her job without notice, she signs up to participate in a month-long sleep study, which will pay her enough to cover rent while she job hunts. It seems easy enough—until she walks into the clinic and finds herself staring right into the gorgeous eyes of Xander Miller, the only man to have ever tempted her to abandon her no-relationships rule. When Xander and Ashleigh realize the study is only looking for couples, they agree to pretend to be together—which means sleeping in the same bed every night for the next few weeks. How hard can it be to keep their cool under the covers? You can expect...- Fake dating (for science)- Only one bed (every night)- No feelings (allegedly)- Second chance romance- Golden retriever MMC- Hot mess FMC- Banter as a love language- Undeniable chemistry!

One bed. One (very awkward) shared past. What could go wrong? With a fun and steamy twist on the only-one-bed trope, this debut contemporary romance will delight fans of The Love Hypothesis and The Paradise Problem. Chemistry teacher Ashleigh Hutchinson knows better than anyone that love and lust don’t mix. The feelings come from different hormones, they trigger different responses, and they demand different reactions. Which is why she doesn’t date. She hooks up. No catching-of-feels required. When Ashleigh is fired from her job without notice, she signs up to participate in a month-long sleep study, which will pay her enough to cover rent while she job hunts. It seems easy enough—until she walks into the clinic and finds herself staring right into the gorgeous eyes of Xander Miller, the only man to have ever tempted her to abandon her no relationships rule. When Xander and Ashleigh realize the study is only looking for couples, they agree to pretend to be together—which means sleeping in the same bed every night for the next few weeks. How hard can it be to keep their cool under the covers? With steamy “will they or won’t they” tension and plenty of hilariously awkward moments, Bed Chemistry is sure to appeal to fans of Christina Lauren, Ali Hazelwood, and Meghan Quinn.

* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction * "I'm in love with a grieving misfit driving around with a donkey-shaped pi ata in an old van held together by duct tape...the great miracle of McKenzie's writing... is how she manages to transform misery into gentle humor...darkly hilarious." --The Washington Post "An addictive read with an ultimately hopeful core that recalls Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Richard Brautigan, and Miranda July" - Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she's quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what's possible when all else fails. Elizabeth McKenzie, the National Book Award-nominated author of The Portable Veblen, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a pi ata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother. What is "the Scintillator"? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way? This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life's curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN’S PRIZE FOR FICTION The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen ?'Incredibly funny and very moving’ BELLA MACKIE 'A blissful novel that I want to give to everyone I love’ NINA STIBBE ‘Even funnier, even more romantic than McKenzie’s wonderful last’ KAREN JOY FOWLER Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over, she’s quit her job, her parents have been missing in the Australian outback for five years and now she’s back home in Santa Barbara, dealing with mounting family crises and living out of a borrowed van named The Dog of the North. The Dog is replete with gingham curtains, wood panelling, a piñata, clunky brakes and difficult steering. It’s also Penny’s getaway car from the curveballs life’s throwing at her. With an uncertain future ahead of her, could the road she’s on lead her back to herself?

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMENâ?? S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023 The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen

LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023The darkly comic new novel from the bestselling author of The Portable Veblen

* Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize * A New Yorker Best Book of the Year * A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * Nominated for the Women's Prize for Fiction * "I'm in love with a grieving misfit driving around with a donkey-shaped pi ata in an old van held together by duct tape...the great miracle of McKenzie's writing... is how she manages to transform misery into gentle humor...darkly hilarious." --The Washington Post "An addictive read with an ultimately hopeful core that recalls Haruki Murakami, Sayaka Murata, Richard Brautigan, and Miranda July" - Sanjena Sathian, author of Gold Diggers Penny Rush has problems. Her marriage is over; she's quit her job. Her mother and stepfather went missing in the Australian outback five years ago; her mentally unbalanced father provokes her; her grandmother Dr. Pincer keeps experiments in the refrigerator and something worse in the woodshed. But Penny is a virtuoso at what's possible when all else fails. Elizabeth McKenzie, the National Book Award-nominated author of The Portable Veblen, follows Penny on her quest for a fresh start. There will be a road trip in the Dog of the North, an old van with gingham curtains, a pi ata, and stiff brakes. There will be injury and peril. There will be a dog named Kweecoats and two brothers who may share a toupee. There will be questions: Why is a detective investigating her grandmother. What is "the Scintillator"? And can Penny recognize a good thing when it finally comes her way? This slyly humorous, thoroughly winsome novel finds the purpose in life's curveballs, insisting that even when we are painfully warped by those we love most, we can be brought closer to our truest selves.

Stories spanning over a century from the life of TJ 'Jim' McKenzie, his family, friends and people along the way, from the 1890s to 2020s. Recollections of growing up near Longreach CQ from the mid-1930s, early boarding school to National Service, life on sheep stations to meeting Princesses. From sheep shearing to pen pushing. From rural living and working to city life and raising a family from the mid-60s. Jim experienced early tragedy and unusual opportunities, and some unlikely encounters. This collection of anecdotes provides an account of some of the encounters and perspectives, some universal and others unusual, of a mild country boy living in a time of personal and cultural changes and happenings. Delivered with a dash of humour and a somewhat philosophical perspective, it offers a potential chuckle, as well as historical insights into ways of living and working which at times seem to have faded from our modern and urban view, along with some of the characters.

"To mark the 25th anniversary of Chicago Quarterly Review, the fall 2019 issue is appropriately huge, as befits Carl Sandburg's 'stormy, husky, brawling, / City of the Big Shoulders.' Here, in more than 400 pages, are 32 short stories, 20 poems, a suite of photographs and a dozen works of nonfiction. The result isn't just a literary quarterly; it's a tour of the bright and darkling plain we call contemporary American literature." -Michael Dirda, The Washington Post. Featuring work by: Judith Aller * Christopher Todd Anderson * Billy Baites * Ann Voorhees Baker * Deni Ellis Bechard * Max Berwald * John Blades * Harold Bordwell * Steven Carrelli * Michael Collier * Gerardo S mano C rdova * William Virgil Davis * Michael Day * Marcy Dermansky * Regina DiPerna * Christina Drill * Patricia Engel * Peter Ferry * Robert Long Foreman * Luke Geddes * Bob Glassman * Syed Afzal Haider * Liam Heneghan * Charles Hood * Gary Houston * Hugh Iglarsh * Cheryl Collins Isaac * Robert Kerwin * Waqas Khwaja * Chuck Kramer * Yumiko Kurahashi * Louise LeBourgeois * David Lehman * Bronte Lim * Kathleen McGookey * Elizabeth McKenzie * Michael Miner * Faisal Mohyuddin * Roberta Montgomery * Dipika Mukherjee * Gregg Murray * Scott Nadelson * Natalia Nebel * Naomi Shihab Nye * Harry Mark Petrakis * Elina Petrova * Genevieve Plunkett * Jory Post * Signe Ratcliff * Alyssa Ripley * Chuck Rosenthal * R. Craig Sautter * Emily Schulten * Moazzam Sheikh * Brian Allan Skinner * Christine Sneed * Eleanor Spiess-Ferris * James Stacey * Patricia Stacey * Umberto Tosi * Alvaro Villaneuva * Jake Young

A unique political coming of age story, now in English for the first time An NYRB Classics Original Walter Ferranini has been born and bred a man of the left. His father was a worker and an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini's Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco's victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer and to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament. He is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, and profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, and increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory and practice. Walter is, always has been, and always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, and yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.

A laugh-out-loud love story with big ideas â?? and squirrels SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2016

Longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Fiction Finalist for the Baileys Prize for Women's Fiction An exuberant, one-of-a-kind novel about love and family, war and nature, new money and old values by a brilliant New Yorker contributor The Portable Veblen is a dazzlingly original novel that's as big-hearted as it is laugh-out-loud funny. Set in and around Palo Alto, amid the culture clash of new money and old (antiestablishment) values, and with the specter of our current wars looming across its pages, The Portable Veblen is an unforgettable look at the way we live now. A young couple on the brink of marriage--the charming Veblen and her fianc 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 t te- -t te 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. As Paul is swept up by the promise of fame and fortune, Veblen heroically keeps the peace between all the damaged parties involved in their upcoming wedding, until she finds herself falling for someone--or something--else. Throughout, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what is that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is at once an honest inquiry into what we look for in love and an electrifying reading experience.

The highly acclaimed author of Stop That Girl delivers a masterfully plotted debut novel-at once a mystery of identity, sly literary satire, and coming-of age story-capturing a young man's impossible and heroic first love. Twenty-two-year-old MacGregor West, orphaned as a boy, is on a quest: to understand the circumstances of his mother's untimely death. On a foggy San Francisco evening, guided by an old stack of envelopes, Mac finds himself at the mansion of cultural icon Charles Ware, where he encounters the writer's beautiful and enigmatic daughter, Carolyn, trapped in a fold-up bed. Upon freeing her, Mac plunges headlong into the world of the eccentric Ware family and a love affair with a woman whose murky history may be closely linked to his own. MacGregor Tells the World is a poignant and often hilarious ride through present-day San Francisco, a city brimming with memorable characters who help Mac discover just what story is his to tell. Praise for Elizabeth McKenzie's Stop That Girl"Elizabeth McKenzie is an accomplished humorist and a developed stylist, and she wastes no time dazzling the reader with her clean direct language, her simple but searing use of metaphor and her unflinching eye."-The New York Times Book Review "Single-handedly reinvigorate s] the coming-of-age genre. . . . Here is a writer to watch, and a book to breeze through with glee."-San Francisco Chronicle

From the start of Elizabeth McKenzie's beguiling fiction debut, we are drawn into the offbeat worldview of sharp-eyed, intrepid Ann Ransom. Stop That Girl chronicles Ann's colorful coming-of-age travails, from her childhood in a disjointed family through her tender adolescence and beyond. Along the way, she discovers the absurdities that lurk around every corner of a young woman's life, by way of oafish neighbors, overzealous boyfriends, prurient vegetable salesmen, sour landlords, and an iconoclast grandmother, known even to her family as Dr. Frost. Keenly funny and highly original, Stop That Girl is a brilliant examination of the exigencies of love and the fragile fabric of family, and heralds the emergence of a remarkable new voice in fiction.