Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
"[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." Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
Review
"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
Review
"[I]t's off proportionally, both section-to-section and overall, its two halves at odds, each interesting at times but neither truly satisfying, despite Eugenides's prodigious talent. Like Cal, it's damned by its own abundance, not quite sure what it wants to be." Stewart O'Nan, Atlantic Monthly (read the entire )
Review
"Once again, Eugenides proves that he is not only a unique voice in modern literature but also well versed in the nature of the human heart." Library Journal
Review
"It's a gas, a romp, the cat's pajamas....The convolutions of the novel's plot, its big gestures, its deftly handled threads of imagery and symbolism and its wealth of detail combine to produce a largely delightful read." Bethany Schneider, New York Newsday
Review
"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
Review
"If Middlesex were simply a novel about a hermaphrodite who is raised as a woman and then decides to be a man, it would still be a comic tome thats equal parts freaky and funny. But this sophomore offering...is much more....Finally, a book for the literate and the lascivious alike." Bill Gaines, Maxim
Review
"Middlesex vibrates with wit....A virtuosic combination of elegy, sociohistorical study, and picaresque adventure: altogether irrestistable." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Here's your heads-up....Yes, it's that good....A novel of chance, family, sex, surgery, and America, it contains multitudes." Jonathan Miles, Men's Journal
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 (FSG), 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 Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin. Mr. Eugenides now lives in Berlin, Germany, with his wife and daughter.