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Middlesex: A Novel (Oprah's Book Club) (Paperback)
by Jeffrey Eugenides
| Category:
Hermaphrodite, Family, Novel |
| Market price: ¥ 168.00
MSL price:
¥ 158.00
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| Stock:
Pre-order item, lead time 3-7 weeks upon payment [ COD term does not apply to pre-order items ] |
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MSL rating:
 Good for Gifts |
| MSL Pointer Review:
The brilliance of this book emerges not from the superficial story of a hermaphrodite but from the context - historical, scientific, psychological, political, geographical - of Cal's birth and subsequent rebirth. |
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Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Publisher: Picador; 1st edition
Pub. in: May, 2007
ISBN: 0312427735
Pages: 544
Measurements: 8.2 x 5.4 x 1 inches
Origin of product: USA
Order code: BA00280
Other information: ISBN-13: 978-0312427733
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- Awards & Credential -
The winner of Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003 |
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- MSL Picks -
"Middlesex" is a story about a young girl who evolves into a man. Calliope Stephanides (also known as "Cal") always knew that there was something different about her: when all her friends were experiencing the various stages of puberty and growing up, Calliope was struggling with the feelings she developed for her female classmates. It isn't until she is well into her teen years that Calliope finally discovers the truth about herself: she is a hermaphrodite, and although she has been raised as a girl, the masculine tendencies she has been experiencing are a result of physical and hormonal imbalances in her body that cause her to identify with being a male.
Jeffrey Eugenides does an amazing job of tracing Calliope's history back to her grandparents, Desdemona and Lefty Stephanides, who immigrated from Greece and spent most of their lives keeping a major secret: they are actually brother and sister. Eugenides also manages to successfully weave historical events, such Prohibition and the race riots of 1967, into the story. Cal is a very likeable and entertaining reader, and the novel explores the subjects of incest, sex, class, family, and gender with intelligence, sensitivity, and wit.
Target readers:
General readers
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Jeffrey Eugenides was born in Detroit and attended Brown and Stanford Universities. His first novel, The Virgin Suicides, was published by Farrar, Straus, & Giroux to great acclaim in 1993, and he has received numerous awards for his work.
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"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.
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| View all 15 comments |
The New York Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-24 00:00>
"Part Tristram Shandy, part Ishmael, part Holden Caulfield, Cal is a wonderfully engaging narrator. . . A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century." |
Los Angeles Times (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-24 00:00>
A towering achievement. . . . [Eugenides] has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being. |
The Boston Globe (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-24 00:00>
A big, cheeky, splendid novel. . . it goes places few narrators would dare to tread. . . lyrical and fine. |
People (MSL quote), USA
<2007-01-24 00:00>
An epic. . . This feast of a novel is thrilling in the scope of its imagination and surprising in its tenderness. |
View all 15 comments |
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