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Middlesex
by Jeffrey Eugenides
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A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author of The Virgin Suicides — the astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls' school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them — along with Callie's failure to develop — leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia — back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie's grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly real: a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades — and one unusually awkward adolescence — Jeffrey Eugenides's long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It marks the fulfillment of a huge talent, named one of America's best young novelists by both Granta and The New Yorker.
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"[A]n uproarious epic, at once funny and sad, about misplaced identities and family
secrets....Mr. Eugenides has a keen sociological eye for 20th-century American
life....But it's his emotional wisdom, his nuanced insight into his characters'
inner lives, that lends this book its cumulative power." Michiko Kakutani,
The New York Times
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"Middlesex isn't just a respectable sophomore effort; it's a towering
achievement, and it can now be stated unequivocally that Eugenides' initial
triumph wasn't a one-off or a fluke. He has emerged as the great American
writer that many of us suspected him of being." Jeff Turrentine, The Los
Angeles Times
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"[I]ndisputably marvelous....Middlesex begins as a generous, tragicomic family chronicle of immigration and assimilation, becomes along the way a social novel about Detroit...and incorporates a heartbreaking tale of growing up awkward and lonely in '70s suburbia. It's a big, affectionate and often hilarious book...."
Andrew O'Hehir, Salon.com
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"Middlesex vibrates with wit.... A virtuosic combination of elegy,
sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irrestistable."
Kirkus Reviews
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"A wonderfully rich, ambitious novel — it deserves to be a huge success."
Salman Rushdie, New York Magazine
About the Author
Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents emigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Mr. Eugenides was educated at public and private schools, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story. Mr. Eugenides' first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published in 1993. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review, and Granta. His many awards include fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers' Award, and the Harold D. Vursell Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the past few years he has been a Fellow of the Berliner Kunstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Eugenides now lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife and daughter.
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