Author:
McKenzie, Elizabeth, 1958- author.
ImprintNew York : Penguin Press, 2016.
Description430 pages ; 22 cm
Note:End the attachment! -- Sauerkraut and mace -- News is marketing -- Nothing about you is bad -- Plight of the bookworm -- Art is despair with dignity -- Releasing the tool -- Eight knots -- The stoic glacier method -- War cash -- The speechless others -- The passenger years -- The animal rule -- The Nutkinistas -- I melt with you -- Never the same again -- Offense is mandatory -- The CURS -- Maybe yes, maybe no -- Something bad must have happened -- Can you patent the sun? -- The man-squirrel debate -- Hello in there -- Doomed to wonder -- The cyborg -- We can be together -- See for yourself.
Note:"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"-- Provided by publisher.
