2003 Pulitzer Prize for fiction

In 1993, Jeffrey Eugenides published The Virgin Suicides, a spellbinding novel about five mysterious sisters in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and the boys whose lives they would forever change. Middlesex, the author's long awaited follow-up, introduces another Grosse Pointe family: the Stephanides. Reaching across generations, continents, and genders, it's a broad, comic epic, tracing the path of a mutant gene to one Calliope Stephanides. In Cal, our storyteller, that gene finds expression. Eugenides explained in part, "I see it as a family story. I used a hermaphrodite not to tell the story of a freak or someone unlike the rest of us but as a correlative for the sexual confusion and confusion of identity that everyone goes through in adolescence." "[A]n uproarious epic, at once funny and sad," Michiko Kakutani raved in the New York Times. "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." Dave, Powells.com

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 clasmate 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.

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides (FSG), was published in 1993.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

A New York Times Editors' Choice

A Los Angeles Times Best Book

National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee

Lambda Literary Award Nominee

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 physically--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 is a rare genetic mutation--and a guilty secret--that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.

Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence--Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize

Impressive and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century.--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

Impressive and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century . . . It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life.--Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

One of the delights of Middlesex is how soundly it's constructed, with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's episodes, pulling it tight . . . His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with 'the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. That utopian reach makes Middlesex deliriously American; the novel's patron saint is Walt Whitman, and it has some of the shagginess of that poet's verse to go along with the exuberance. But mostly it is a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love.--Laura Miller, The New York Times Book Review

A towering achievement . . . A story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent . . . Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being.--Jeff Turrentine, Los Angeles Times Book Review

A big, cheeky, splendid novel, and its confidence is part of its success, because it goes places few narrators would dare to tread . . . Because Eugenides has imbued his second novel with transcontinental range and historical depth, he has thrown open the gates of Ithaca and sent his narrator on the road. And because he has remembered that the human experience of it is the sine qua non of any adventure, he has given us something lyrical and fine.--Gail Caldwell, The Boston Globe

Middlesex is a novel about discovery, one man's discovery of his place in the world and acceptance of his singularity, his uniqueness. In the process, it is a novel that challenges our preconceptions about gender and our understanding of the universal truths of growing up and growing old.--Michael Pearson, Atlanta Journal-Constitution

The verbal energy and narrative range of Saul Bellow's early fiction (say, The Adventures of Augie March) are born again in this dazzling novel . . . A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irresistible.--Kirkus Reviews

In his second novel, the author once again proves himself to be a wildly imaginative writer . . . Likely to hold readers in thrall with its affecting characterizations of a brave and lonely soul and its vivid depiction of exactly what it means to be both male and female.--Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart. Highly recommended.--Library Journal

From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was 'born twice, ' first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situa

"With a sure yet light-handed touch, Eugenides skillfully bends our notions of gender as we realize, along with Cal, that although he has been raised as a girl, he is more comfortable as a boy." Joanne Wilkinson, Booklist

"Middlesex vibrates with wit....A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irrestistable." Kirkus Reviews

Jeffrey Eugenides grew up in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and attended Brown University. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by FSG to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work. He lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife.