Event forecast: Elizabeth McKenzie, author of "The Portable Veblen," and Edward McClelland, author of "How to Speak Midwestern"

Come out while it's still warm!

Monday, January 23, 7:00 pm at Boswell:
Elizabeth McKenzie, author of The Portable Veblen

Longlisted for the National Book Award and shortlisted for the Bailey's Women's Prize, The Portable Veblen is set amid a California culture clash of new money and antiestablishment values. A young couple on the brink of marriage the charming Veblen and her fiancé Paul, a brilliant neurologist finds their engagement in collapse. As Veblen and Paul face off with their families, a seductive pharmaceutical heiress, and one charismatic squirrel, Elizabeth McKenzie asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? And what’s that squirrel really thinking? Replete with deadpan photos and sly appendices, The Portable Veblen is a bighearted inquiry into what we look for in love.

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, and the Pushcart Prize anthology. She received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and is currently an editor at the Chicago Quarterly Review and the Catamaran Literary Reader.

Read the Boswell and Books blog post about discussing The Portable Veblen at Boswell's In-store Lit Group. Consider The Portable Veblen for your next book club selection.

Tuesday, January 24, 7:00 pm, at Shorewood Public Library, 3290 N Murray Ave:
Edward McClelland, author of How to Speak Midwestern

Pittsburgh toilet, squeaky cheese, city chicken, shampoo banana, and Chevy in the Hole are all phrases that are familiar to Midwesterners but sound foreign to anyone living outside the region. This book explains not only what Midwesterners say but also how and why they say it and covers such topics as: the causes of the Northern cities vowel shift, why the accents in Fargo miss the nasality that’s a hallmark of Minnesota speech, and why Chicagoans talk more like people from Buffalo than their next-door neighbors in Wisconsin. Readers from the Midwest will have a better understanding of why they talk the way they do, and readers who are not from the Midwest will know exactly what to say the next time someone ends a sentence with ”eh?”.

Edward McClelland is a journalist. His writing has appeared in publications such as the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and Salon. He is the author of Nothin’ But Blue Skies and Young Mr. Obama.

Jennifer Schuessler reviewed How to Speak Midwestern in The New York Times. She talks about how the Midwest actually has three bands of accents: The Inland North (which is dominant in Milwaukee), The Midlands (south of us), and North Central (north of us).

Jim Higgins also reviewed How to Speak Midwestern in the Journal Sentinel.