“Savage Breast,” a new short story by UC Santa Cruz alumna Elizabeth McKenzie, will be featured in the December 15 issue of The New Yorker magazine.
“The story is about a woman who finds herself in her childhood home, now inhabited by beasts,” notes McKenzie.
“While at first she enjoys the beasts’ kindness and generosity, the story takes a disturbing turn and she finds herself accompanying the beasts on the equivalent of a death march.”
McKenzie received her B.A. in Literature from UC Santa Cruz in 1981. She taught on campus as a Kresge lecturer from 2008 to 2010.
She is also the author of Stop That Girl, a collection of short stories (dubbed “anti-fairy tales” by NPR) that was published in 2006 by Random House, short-listed for The Story Prize, and was a Newsday and Library Journal “Best Book of the Year.”
McKenzie has received a Pushcart Prize for her short fiction, and had a story chosen by Dave Eggers for his anthology Best American Nonrequired Reading.
Her work has also appeared in the Atlantic magazine and been recorded for NPR's Selected Shorts.
McKenzie’s debut novel MacGregor Tells the World, additionally won acclaim as a Chicago Tribune “Best Book of the Year,” and a San Francisco Chronicle “Notable Book.”
She said she is currently at work on a new novel, The Portable Veblen, about a young woman in California who is engaged to an ambitious neurologist. It’s an unusual love story--the couple’s quirky families enter the mix, as well as a family of squirrels and the memory of 19th century economist Thorstein Veblen.
