(Bloomsbury)
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Synopsis
Winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
Lefty and Desdemona must flee the Turks who are invading their crumbling
city in the Ottoman Empire, and decide to head for America. What this
unusual brother and sister do not realise is that a rare genetic mutation
is following them. It secretly travels with them first to Detroit, and
then to suburbia, through prohibition and the race riots of 1967. And
in the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, finds herself drawn to a
chain-smoking, strawberry-blonde classmate with a gift for acting. The
passion that develops between them leads Callie to suspect that she is
not like other girls.
Through eight decades — and one unusually awkward adolescence —
Jeffrey Eugenides’ long-awaited second novel is a breathtaking vision
of the American Dream and a modern fable of crossed bloodlines, immigration,
the intricacies of gender, and deep, untidy desire.
Biography
Jeffrey
Eugenides — winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Middlesex
— was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960, the third son of an American-born
father whose Greek parents immigrated from Asia Minor and an American
mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Eugenides was educated at public and private
schools, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received
an MA in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986.
Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story.
His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Yale
Review, Best American Short Stories, The Gettysburg Review and Granta's
‘Best of Young American Novelists’. His first novel, The Virgin
Suicides, was published in 1993, and has since been translated into fifteen
languages nd made into a major motion picture. His second novel, Middlesex,
is published in paperback in September 2003.
Eugenides is the recipient of many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize,
fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and The National Foundation
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.
Contributors Testimonials
Jeffrey
Eugenides’ modern epic masterpiece follows the engrossing, convoluted
family history of Cal, a Greek-American hermaphdite from Mount Olympus
and the Motor City to Gross Pointe, Michigan and Berlin. Born with ambiguous
genitalia (like a crocus, before flowering), Cal was raised a girl until
puberty and a lust for her? best friend led to the discovery that she
was chromosomally a man. The first person novel begins long before Cal’s
conception when the omniscient unborn narrator tells us of his family’s
darkest secret, that his grandmother and grandfather were also siblings.
Framed within the story of an immigrant family's progress, Middlesex is
also a fascinating history of America in the 20th century, taking in everything
from incest and modern medicine’s inability to deal with intersexuality,
to undeclared civil race wars and the flow of immigration in the US to,
from and back again. Tellingly,it’s the America that we aren’t
supposed to see.
Tricia Tuttle