Jeffrey Eugenides

First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sistersbeautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boyscommit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece...

The long-awaited new novel from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jeffrey Eugenides."e;There is no happiness in love, except at the end of an English novel."e; Anthony Trollope, Barchester TowersMadeleine Hanna was the dutiful English major who didn't get the memo. While everyone else in the early 1980s was reading Derrida, she was...

'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...

The shocking thing about the girls was how nearly normal they seemed when their mother let them out for the one and only date of their lives. Twenty years on, their enigmatic personalities are embalmed in the memories of the boys who worshipped them and who now recall their shared adolescence: the brassiere draped over a crucifix belonging to the...