MacGregor Tells the World - by Elizabeth McKenzie (Paperback)

About the Book

The highly acclaimed author of "Stop That Girl" delivers a masterfully plotted debut novel. In what is at once a mystery of identity, a sly literary satire, and a coming-of age story, McKenzie deftly captures a young mans impossible and heroic first love.

Book Synopsis

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

About the Author

Elizabeth McKenzie is the author of the 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, The Best American Nonrequired Reading, and the Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses anthology, and has been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts. She was an NEA Japan US-Friendship Commission Fellow in 2010. McKenzie received her MA from Stanford, was an assistant fiction editor at The Atlantic, and currently teaches creative writing at Stanford Continuing Studies.