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Middlesex

by Jeffrey Eugenides

Summary

"Cal" Stephanides recounts his rich family history, beginning with his grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty (secretly siblings), as they leave Greece in the 1920s and settle in Detroit. By the time Calliope is born in 1960, his parents are upper middle-class Greek Americans, but when he is 14 they discover that Calliope is actually a hermaphrodite. Taking the name "Cal," he runs away, finally finding a home in a San Francisco burlesque show. Jeffrey Eugenides's epic novel, like its main character, is a wonderful hybrid creature that perfectly captures three distinctly American stories: the immigrant tale, life in the 1960s suburban world, and finally the gender-bending and identity-altering situations that we associate with the beginning of the 21st century. Awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 2003, MIDDLESEX became both a literary and a commercial success-a success further bolstered by its selection for the Oprah Book Club in 2007.

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Media Reviews

"MIDDLESEX is consistently whimsical in its scene-setting and use of language, but despite its vaudeville exchanges and niftily isolated punch lines, it's rarely out-and-out funny....[I]ts two halves [are] at odds, each interesting at times but neither truly satisfying, despite Eugenides's prodigious talent."    -- Stewart O'Nan

   -- Atlantic Monthly

"[W]hile some of the odds and ends Eugenides tosses into the mix...don't quite integrate, far more often than not the novel feels rich with treats, including some handsome writing....[T]he 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

   -- New York Times Book Review

"[L]et me shake Eugenides's hand and say that MIDDLESEX contains scenes that are as wonderful as written prose can get, and these passages have nothing to do with askew genitalia....MIDDLESEX begins as a neo-Doctorow Depression-era novel, then becomes a Son of John Irving 1950s novel, before ending as a kind of VIRGIN SUICIDES redux."    -- David Bowman

   -- Bookforum

Bibliographic Details

Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux
Published date: 2002
Edition: 1th edition
Size: 6.5 x 9.5 inches
Weight: 1.95 pounds
Pages: 544

Publisher's Notes

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 classmate 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.

Other Editions

• Paperback Reprint - St Martins Pr (2003) - from $1.00
• Hardcover - Farrar Straus & Giroux (2002) - from $10.95

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