Jeffrey Eugenides - Middlesex

Middlesex

From 1999 to 2004, Eugenides lived in Berlin, Germany, where he moved after being awarded a grant from the German Academic Exchange Service to write in Berlin for a year. Eugenides has lived in Princeton, New Jersey, since the fall of 2007, when Eugenides joined the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.

His 2002 novel, Middlesex, won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2003 in addition to being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, and France's Prix Medicis. Following the life and self-discovery of Calliope Stephanides, or later, Cal, a hermaphrodite raised a girl, but hormonally a boy, Middlesex also broadly deals with the Greek-American immigrant experience in the United States, the rise and fall of Detroit, and explores the experience of the intersexed in the USA.

Eugenides also published short stories in the near decade between The Virgin Suicides and Middlesex, primarily in The New Yorker. His 1996 story "Baster" became the basis for the 2010 romantic comedy The Switch, temporarily putting Middlesex aside in the late 90's to begin work on a novel that would eventually serve as the basis for his third. Two excerpts of what became Eugenides work-in-progress third novel after Middlsex also appeared in The New Yorker in 2011, "Asleep in the Lord" and "Extreme Solitude". Eugenides also served as the editor of the collection of short stories titled My Mistress's Sparrow is Dead. The proceeds of the collection go to the writing center 826 Chicago, established to encourage young people's writing.