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.
"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, Jeffrey Eugenides's Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.
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American fiction often examines the intersections of family history, suburban insulation, and personal identity across changing social landscapes. Jeffrey Eugenides established his place in contemporary literature through deeply empathetic fiction that blends broad historical scope with intricate character studies, most notably in his Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Middlesex.
Born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, Eugenides grew up experiencing the city and its surrounding suburbs, including Grosse Pointe, which later served as vital settings for his early fiction. He earned an undergraduate degree magna cum laude from Brown University before completing a Master of Arts in English and Creative Writing at Stanford University in 1986. Over his career, he lived in Brooklyn and Berlin, later serving as a professor of creative writing at New York University.
His literary debut occurred in 1993 with the publication of The Virgin Suicides, which earned widespread critical acclaim and was adapted into a 1999 feature film. He spent nearly a decade writing his second novel, Middlesex, published in 2002. The novel received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the WELT-Literaturpreis of Germany, and the Great Lakes Book Award, while also being named a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, France's Prix Médicis, and the International Dublin Literary Award. He followed this success with his third novel, The Marriage Plot, in 2011, which was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize.
Eugenides is known for combining precise structural architecture with humor and nuanced psychological observation. His work frequently explores themes of coming-of-age, gender identity, Greek-American heritage, suburban alienation, and romantic disillusionment. Setting plays a foundational role in his narrative technique, particularly his vivid depictions of mid-to-late twentieth-century Detroit and its affluent residential environs.
