Jeffrey Eugenides
Award-Winning Novelist & Essayist


Jeffrey Eugenides is the influential author of three wildly popular novels, as well as a new collection of short stories entitled Fresh Complaint. Eugenides’ first novel, The Virgin Suicides, follows the mysterious lives and deaths of five sisters and was adapted into a critically-acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola in 1999.

 

In 2003, Jeffrey Eugenides received the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Middlesex, a cross-generational tale focusing on an intersex protagonist. Middlesex also received the Ambassador Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, the Lambda Literary Award, and France’s Prix Medicis. It was also selected for Oprah’s Book Club.

 

His 2011 novel, The Marriage Plot, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and won both the Prix Fitzgerald and the Madame Figaro Literary Prize. In 2017, he published his first collection of short stories, Fresh Complaint.

 

Jeffrey is the recipient of many awards, including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, a Whiting Writers’ Award, and the Henry D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He has also been a part of the Berliner Künstlerprogramm of the DAAD and of the American Academy in Berlin.

 

Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960. He attended Brown University and graduated with magna cum laude and later graduated Stanford University with a M.A in English and Creative Writing in 1986. 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.” After spending some time in Berlin, Eugenides now lives in New Jersey with his wife and daughter. He joined the faculty of Princeton in the program of Creative Writing in the fall of 2007. In January 2008, he published an anthology, My Mistress’s Sparrow Is Dead: Great Love Stories from Chekhov to Munro, the proceeds of which went directly to fund the free youth writing programs offered by 826 Chicago. You can follow Jeffrey on Facebook.

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Hardcover
Farrar, Straus and Giroux

The first collection of short fiction from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides. Ranging from the reproductive antics of “Baster” to the wry, moving account of a young traveler’s search for enlightenment in “Air Mail” (selected by Annie Proulx for The Best American Short Stories 1997), this collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. Fresh Complaint hits shelves in October 2017.

Paperback
Picador

It's the early 1980s. In American colleges, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine studies the age-old motivations of the human heart, real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes - the charismatic and intense Leonard Bankhead, and her old friend the mystically inclined Mitchell Grammaticus. As all three of them face life in the real world they will have to reevaluate everything they have learned.

Paperback
Picador

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters - beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys - commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mystery of the family's fatal melancholy, in this hypnotic and unforgettable novel of adolescent love, disquiet, and death.

Paperback
MiddlesexA Novel
Picador

"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.So begins the breathtaking story of Calliope Stephanides. 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, Middlesex is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic.

An Evening with Jeffrey Eugenides








Read Jonathan Safran Foer’s conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides.

Read Juliette Lewis’ interview with Jeffrey.

Read “A Conversation with Jeffrey Eugenides” on Oprah.com.

Check out Jeffrey’s appearance at the 2016 New Yorker Festival alongside Zadie Smith.

Read a Jeffrey’s discussion with Slate about The Marriage Plot.

Read an interview with Jeffrey in the New York Times.

Watch Jeffrey discuss his writing and his hometown with Sam Tanenhaus of the New York Times.

Read The Paris Review‘s interview with Jeffrey.

Read Jeffrey’s review of Karl Knausgaard’s My Struggle: Book 4 in the New York Times.

Like Jeffrey’s page on Facebook.

Praise for Middlesex

"Expansive and radiantly generous. . . Deliriously American."
--The New York Times Book Review (cover review)

"A towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being."
--Los Angeles Times Book Review (cover review)

"A big, cheeky, splendid novel. . . it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. . . lyrical and fine."
--The Boston Globe

"Wildly imaginative. . . frequently hilarious and touching."
--USA Today