Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of The Portable Veblen, forthcoming from Penguin in 2016. 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. 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.
There's Nothing Wrong with Her (2024) Kate Weinberg "This painfully funny novel sizzles with love and desire, isolation and loss, and the incongruous breakthroughs that take place when one has little left to lose."
Pelican Girls (2024) Julia Malye "Pelican Girls is a feat of sublime imagination, every page a wonder. Malye has written an unforgettably rich and sensual novel--a triumph."
Same Bed Different Dreams (2023) Ed Park "No blurb could adequately praise or even sum up this novel. All I know is that Same Bed Different Dreams belongs in the company of a rare few dark and comic masterpieces of invention. It disarmed me with sheer delight."
The Beautiful and the Wild (2023) Peggy Townsend "The Beautiful and the Wild probes the darkest corners of human heart; in the context of a marriage gone wrong, it's hard to imagine anything more terrifying. Townsend's masterfully written novel takes us to a harrowing past informing an even more treacherous present, chilling and unforgettable."
Speak to Me (2023) Paula Cocozza "With a brilliant, thwarted woman at its heart, SPEAK TO ME is a novel of longing like no other. Cocozza's command of this narrative voice is mesmerizing - I read it at a sitting, entranced."
Lost on Me (2023) Veronica Raimo "Lost on Me was anything but; I was utterly seduced by this wry and fearless novel featuring the unforgettable voice of Vero, a young woman with a sharp sense of humour and a splendid eye for the absurd."
Killingly (2023) Katharine Beutner "This is a superb novel, suffused with dread, riddled with covert motivations and desires, reckoning with painful secrets, artfully rendering the myriad facets of this mysterious case while bearing witness to the sacrifices many women have made to live--and die--authentically."
Josie and Vic (2023) Debra Thomas "In this beautifully crafted novel, tragedies test family bonds while revealing the power of love and the strength and resilience of the human spirit."
The Artist Colony (2021) Joanna FitzPatrick "It’s 1924 and a young woman journeys to Carmel, California, to learn more about her sister’s sudden death. She soon learns that the bohemian arts colony is anything but idyllic, as she’s confronted by flagrant racism and intimations of murder. Fitzpatrick has written a vivid historical novel with an absorbing mystery at the center of it, and I was riveted."
Oligarchy (2019) Scarlett Thomas "The savagery of a private girls' school in England is not to be underestimated and never to be forgotten upon reading Oligarchy, Scarlett Thomas’s scathing and brilliantly written novel of wealth and vanity run terribly amok."
The Gardener of Eden (2019) David Downie "The Gardener of Eden is a novel of great originality--lively, engaging, unexpected, sharp, and poetic. Downie is a master of the eerie and bizarre, and his character Beverley is one of the great literary creations of the century."
I Am God (2019) Giacomo Sartori "I am God is like a mirthful dream made real by the ingenuity of Sartori’s prose and Randall’s splendidly pointed and sly translation."
The Removes (2018) Tatjana Soli "The Removes is as beautiful a novel as I’ve read in some time. It tells of the nearly unimaginable brutality of western expansion through the stories of two women living in diverse captivities: Libbie, wife of philandering General Custer, and Anne, captured as a girl by the Cheyenne. Tatjana Soli’s writing is spare, lyrical, haunting, and heartbreaking, and countless images from this book will stay with me forever: the harsh majesty of the plains, the 'sheer animal joy' of horses running into battle, and the bravado of Custer’s long, meandering march to his ruin."
Gork, the Teenage Dragon (2017) Gabe Hudson "Gork’s no Puff, frolicking in some 'autumn mist' or whatever. Gork’s one badass outer space dragon. His secret weapon? Poetry! Gork’s got it going on. This wonderful, big-hearted, crazy novel is a testament to Gabe Hudson’s ingenious imagination."
Touch (2017) Courtney Maum "Touch is so smart that even its comic absurdities quiver with wisdom, as an anti-mom and a neo-sensualist confirm our suspicion that the lives of trendsetters aren’t quite what they appear to be. Maum’s writing is sharp and complex - prepare to be touched by this novel is ways you might not expect."
