Middlesex

Front Cover
Knopf Canada, Jul 18, 2011 - Fiction - 544 pages
Spanning eight decades and chronicling the wild ride of a Greek-American family through the vicissitudes of the twentieth century, Jeffrey Eugenides’ witty, exuberant novel on one level tells a traditional story about three generations of a fantastic, absurd, lovable immigrant family -- blessed and cursed with generous doses of tragedy and high comedy.

But there’s a provocative twist. Cal, the narrator -- also Callie -- is a hermaphrodite. And the explanation for this takes us spooling back in time, through a breathtaking review of the twentieth century, 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 our narrator’s life in motion.

Middlesex is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. It’s a brilliant exploration of divided people, divided families, divided cities and nations -- the connected halves that make up ourselves and our world.
 

Selected pages

Contents

BOOK
3
Matchmaking
19
An Immodest Proposal
40
The Silk Road
63
Henry Fords EnglishLanguage Melting Pot
79
Minotaurs
106
Marriage on Ice
126
Tricknology
149
The Wolverette
291
Waxing Lyrical
307
The Obscure Object
319
Tiresias in Love
340
Flesh and Blood
361
The Gun on the Wall
377
The Oracular Vulva
401
Looking Myself Up in Websters
424

Clarinet Serenade
166
News of the World
183
Ex Ovo Omnia
198
Home Movies
215
Opa
232
Middlesex
252
The Mediterranean Diet
271
Go West Young Man
440
Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco
459
Hermaphroditus
478
AirRide
497
The Last Stop
513
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About the author (2011)

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published to acclaim in 1993. It has been translated into fifteen languages and made into a feature film. 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."

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