A dazzling triumph from the bestselling author ofThe 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 clasmate 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 bothGrantaandThe New Yorker. Jeffrey Eugenideswas 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(FSG), was published in 1993. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize ANew York TimesEditors' Choice ALos Angeles TimesBest 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 "Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . ABuddenbrooks-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." Michiko Kakutani,The New York Times "Impressive [and] wonderfully engaging . . . ABuddenbrooks-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 b Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

As the Age of the Genome begins to dawn, we will, perhaps, expect our fictional protagonists to know as much about the chemical details of their ancestry as Victorian heroes knew about their estates. If so, Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides) is ahead of the game. His beautifully written novel begins: "Specialized readers may have come across me in Dr. Peter Luce's study, 'Gender Identity in 5-Alpha-Reductase Pseudohermaphrodites.' " The "me" of that sentence, "Cal" Stephanides, narrates his story of sexual shifts with exemplary tact, beginning with his immigrant grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty. On board the ship taking them from war-torn Turkey to America, they married-but they were brother and sister. Eugenides spends the book's first half recreating, with a fine-grained density, the Detroit of the 1920s and '30s where the immigrants settled: Ford car factories and the tiny, incipient sect of Black Muslims. Then comes Cal's story, which is necessarily interwoven with his parents' upward social trajectory. Milton, his father, takes an insurance windfall and parlays it into a fast-food hotdog empire. Meanwhile, Tessie, his wife, gives birth to a son and then a daughter-or at least, what seems to be a female baby. Genetics meets medical incompetence meets history, and Callie is left to think of her "crocus" as simply unusually long-until she reaches the age of 14. Eugenides, like Rick Moody, has an extraordinary sensitivity to the mores of our leafier suburbs, and Cal's gender confusion is blended with the story of her first love, Milton's growing political resentments and the general shedding of ethnic habits. Perhaps the most wonderful thing about this book is Eugenides's ability to feel his way into the girl, Callie, and the man, Cal. It's difficult to imagine any serious male writer of earlier eras so effortlessly transcending the stereotypes of gender. This is one determinedly literary novel that should also appeal to a large, general audience. Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

The author of The Virgin Suicides is known for his daring, so it's hardly surprising that "Middlesex" refers not to a town but a state of being: Calliope, a student at an exclusive girls school during the 1970s, discovers that she is a hermaphrodite. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Adult/High School-From the opening paragraph, in which the narrator explains that he was "born twice," first as a baby girl in 1960, then as a teenage boy in 1974, readers are aware that Calliope Stephanides is a hermaphrodite. To explain his situation, Cal starts in 1922, when his grandparents came to America. In his role as the "prefetal narrator," he tells the love story of this couple, who are brother and sister; his parents are blood relatives as well. Then he tells his own story, which is that of a female child growing up in suburban Detroit with typical adolescent concerns. Callie, as he is known then, worries because she hasn't developed breasts or started menstruating; her facial hair is blamed on her ethnicity, and she and her mother go to get waxed together. She develops a passionate crush on her best girlfriend, "the Object," and consummates it in a manner both detached and steamy. Then an accident causes Callie to find out what she's been suspecting-she's not actually a girl. The story questions what it is that makes us who we are and concludes that one's inner essence stays the same, even in light of drastic outer changes. Mostly, the novel remains a universal narrative of a girl who's happy to grow up but hates having to leave her old self behind. Readers will love watching the narrator go from Callie to Cal, and witnessing all of the life experiences that get her there.-Jamie Watson, Enoch Pratt Free Library, Baltimore Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Jeffrey Eugenides is a novelist. His first book, The Virgin Suicides, earned him comparisons to such writers as William Wharton and Alice McDermott. The book's first chapter, which describes a teenaged girl jumping out of a window and impaling herself on a fence, won the 1991 Aga Khan Prize for Fiction. Eugenides also received a Whiting Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship.

Eugenides was named by Granta magazine as one of the 20 best American novelists under forty.

(Bowker Author Biography) Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

Book 1
The Silver Spoon	p. 13
Matchmaking	p. 41
An Immodest Proposal	p. 80
The Silk Road	p. 121
Book 2
Henry Ford's English-Language Melting Pot	p. 149
Minotaurs	p. 198
Marriage on Ice	p. 235
Tricknology	p. 276
Clarinet Serenade	p. 304
News of the World	p. 335
Ex Ovo Omnia	p. 362
Book 3
Home Movies	p. 391
Opa!	p. 423
Middlesex	p. 459
The Mediterranean Diet	p. 494
The Wolverette	p. 531
Waxing Lyrical	p. 562
The Obscure Object	p. 582
Tiresias in Love	p. 620
Flesh and Blood	p. 655
The Gun on the Wall	p. 684
Book 4
The Oracular Vulva	p. 723
Looking Myself Up in Webster's	p. 764
Go West, Young Man	p. 792
Gender Dysphoria in San Francisco	p. 826
Hermaphroditus	p. 859
Air-Ride	p. 893
The Last Stop	p. 922

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