Middlesex

""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, "Middlesex "is an exhilarating reinvention of the American epic. Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1960, graduated from Brown University, and received an M.A. in English and Creative Writing from Stanford University in 1986. His first novel, "The Virgin Suicides," was published in 1993. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
A "New York Times" Editors' Choice
A "Los Angeles Times" Best Book
National Book Critics Circle Award Nominee
Lambda Literary Award Nominee
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 physically--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 is a rare genetic mutation--and a guilty secret--that have followed Callie's grandparents from the crumbling Ottoman Empire to Prohibition-era Detroit and beyond, outlasting the glory days of the Motor City, the race riots of 1967, and the family's second migration, into the foreign country known as suburbia. Thanks to the gene, Callie is part girl, part boy. And even though the gene's epic travels have ended, her own odyssey has only begun.
Spanning eight decades--and one unusually awkward adolescence--Jeffrey Eugenides' long-awaited second novel is a grand, original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
"A towering achievement . . . A story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent . . . Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being."--Jeff Turrentine, "Los Angeles Times Book Review" "Jeffrey Eugenides is a big and big-hearted talent, and "Middlesex" is a weird, wonderful novel that will sweep you off your feet."--Jonathan Franzen
"Impressive and] wonderfully engaging . . . A Buddenbrooks-like saga that traces three generations' efforts to grapple with America and with their own versions of the American Dream . . . Eugenides] has not only followed up on a precocious debut with a broader and more ambitious book, but in doing so, he has also delivered a deeply affecting portrait of one family's tumultuous engagement with the American 20th century . . . It is a novel that employs all its author's rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family's idiosyncratic journey from the not-so-pearly gates of Ellis Island to the suburban vistas of Grosse Pointe, Michigan, while at the same time tracing the rise and fall in fortunes of Detroit, from its apotheosis as the Motor City in the 40's and 50's through the race riots of 1967 and its subsequent decline. It is also a novel that invokes ancient myths and contemporary pop songs to show how family traits and inclinations are passed down generation to generation, a novel that uses musical leitmotifs to show the unexpected ways in which chance and fate weave their improvisations into the loom of family life."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"One of the delights of "Middlesex" is how soundly it's constructed, with motifs and characters weaving through the novel's episodes, pulling it tight . . . His narrator is a soul who inhabits a liminal realm, a creature able to bridge the divisions that plague humanity, endowed with 'the ability to communicate between the genders, to see not with the monovision of one sex but in the stereoscope of both. That utopian reach makes "Middlesex" deliriously American; the 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, "The New York Times Book Review"
"At last Detroit has its great novel. What Dublin got from James Joyce--a sprawling, ambitious, loving exasperated, and playful chronicle of all its good and bad parts--Detroit has from native son Eugenides."--"Detroit Free Press"
"A towering achievement . . . A story that manages to be both illuminating and transcendent . . . Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer many of us suspected him of being."--Jeff Turrentine, "Los Angeles Times Book Review"
"Whatever you might be expecting, "Middlesex" will surprise you . . . a rolling epic . . . the kind of book that urges you to be read in one day, then reread."--Jonathan Safran Foer, "Bomb"
"Rollicking, gleefully inventive . . . "Middlesex" serves as a tribute to Nabokovian themes . . . Eugenides recounts the revelation of Callie's genetic abnormality through a series of near-discoveries that are amazingly, comically missed."--"The Washington Post"
"A big, cheeky, splendid novel, and its confidence is part of its success, because it goes places few narrators would dare to tread . .