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How to Clarify Butter: A Writer's Tale

2 comments By Edward Lee

Chefs don't have time to write. While I was working on Smoke and Pickles, I was running a restaurant — a daily regimen of testing recipes,... Continue »

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Smoke and Pickles: Recipes and Stories from a New Southern Kitchen
Edward LeeEdward Lee 9781579654924

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Middlesex

by Eugenides Jeffrey

ISBN13: 9780747561620
ISBN10: 0747561621
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Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day of January 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of l974. . . My birth certificate lists my name as Calliope Helen Stephanides. My most recent driver's license...records my first name simply as Cal.

So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides and three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family who travel from a tiny village overlooking Mount Olympus in Asia Minor to Prohibition-era Detroit, witnessing its glory days as the Motor City, and the race riots of l967, before they move out to the tree-lined streets of suburban Grosse Pointe, Michigan. To understand why Calliope is not like other girls, she has to uncover a guilty family secret and the astonishing genetic history that turns Callie into Cal, one of the most audacious and wondrous narrators in contemporary fiction. Lyrical and thrilling, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

Synopsis:

This is the tale of a gene that passes down through three generations and flowers in the teenage body of Callie. Thanks to this gene, she begins to realise she is part girl, part boy. What results is a fable of the intricacies of gender and the untidy promptings of desire.

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: S.Elliott, May 5, 2007 (view all comments by S.Elliott)
There is so much more to this book than just the basic idea of "gender confusion". While Cal's story is ultimately dictated by being a hermaphrodite, it goes beyond that and discusses love, families, immigration and passion.

The book takes patience; it has a slow start and the pace slows down in the middle. But the pay-off is a rewarding connection to this family and all of the history their genes created.
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Product Details

ISBN:: 9780747561620
Publisher:: Bloomsbury
Location:: London
Subject:: Teenage girls
Subject:: Greek Americans
Series Volume:: 2003-7
Publication Date:: 2003
Pages:: viii, 529 p.

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