Word: middlesexã
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...don’t think I’ve ever seen a Princeton student smoke, but just look at all of you here,” remarked Jeffrey Eugenides—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of “Middlesex?? and “The Virgin Suicides”—of the cigarette smoke that veiled the audience and room at an event at The Harvard Advocate last Tuesday. After reading a passage from the novel that he is working on, Eugenides—a creative writing professor at Princeton and alum of Brown?...
...tend to doubt my work a lot. I’m always reading it through for flow and messing with it again. It’s not the most effective way, but I enjoy writing that way… I wrote ten openings for “Middlesex?? before finding the right one. That was eight hundred to a thousand pages in the trash...
...though Eugenides is an extremely meticulous writer, he recalled how good fortune prodded him into writing “Middlesex??—a novel brimming with themes of fate and destiny. “I was at the artistic colony Yaddo, trying to write the opening with the burning of Smyrna in 1922 without having done my research. But it just sounded so false. I was desperate; I thought I had to give [“Middlesex??] up, so I wandered downstairs where there was a stack of books left for anyone?...
Though Eugenides is half-Greek and “Middlesex?? is centered on the ancient traditions of tragedies, epics, and myth, he confessed that the novel is less autobiographical than might be expected—drawing from his personal background more for literary authenticity than plot...
...Middlesex?? is Cal’s novel: a family history tracking the recessive gene mutation that accounts for his troubling condition as “a male pseudohermaphorodite—genetically male, but appearing otherwise.” He starts in Turkey: siblings Desdemona and Lefty flee that country’s conflict with Greece to start anew in America as husband and wife. In Detroit, cousins Milton and Tessie fall in love and become engaged amidst the turmoil of the Second World War. Calliope, their daughter—born and raised as a girl—learns...