Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides

Story
I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smog less 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 GreekAmerican 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 Point,
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.
(From Bloomsbury Publishing)

Author details
Jeffrey Eugenides winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Middlesex, reissued by Bloomsbury in October
2011 was born in Detroit, Michigan in 1960, the third son of an American-born father whose Greek parents
immigrated from Asia Minor and an American mother of Anglo-Irish descent. Eugenides was educated at public and
private schools, graduated magna cum laude from Brown University, and received an MA in English and Creative
Writing from Stanford University in 1986. Two years later, in 1988, he published his first short story.
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. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published
in 1993 and reissued by Bloomsbury in October 2011, and has since been translated into fifteen languages and
made into a major motion picture. His second novel, Middlesex, was published in paperback in September 2003,
reissued in October 2011 and selected by Waterstone's as one of their top 100 books of the last 25 years.
(From Bloomsbury Publishing)

Other titles by author

Books by Jeffrey Eugenides

Discussion points

Are the characters of Lefty and Desdemona believable?

What is your thought on the Style of writing used by Jeffrey Eugenides?

What are the main themes of Middlesex?

How do the various settings in Middlesex impact on the story?

Did you enjoy Middlesex? Why or why not?

Useful websites
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlesex_(novel)
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jeffrey-Kent-Eugenides/111706482182364
http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1467.Jeffrey_Eugenides