Jeffrey Eugenides - The Marriage Plot

After a nine-year gap, Eugenides published his third novel, 2011's The Marriage Plot in October 2011. The novel follows three young adults enmeshed in a love triangle, as they graduate from Brown University and establish themselves in the world. Eugenides is currently at work developing a television screenplay of the novel, which was a finalist of the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction in 2011; a New York Times notable book for 2011; and one of the top books of the year according to lists made by Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and The Telegraph.

Eugenides has revealed that his next literary project will be a book of short stories " which will be a very mixed bag of stories, quite different, not all arranged around a certain theme.", and that he has an idea for a fourth novel: "I have an idea; I don’t know if it’s going to work. But it’s going to be a larger canvas, many more characters than in . Again, I’m going to respond to a very small directive. It’s going to be written, well, I’m not going to say — but I know how it’s going to be written and what the structure’s going to be, and it’s going to be quite different than “The Marriage Plot.”"

After years living in Berlin and Chicago, Eugenides is now based, with his wife and child, in Princeton, New Jersey, where he is Professor of Creative Writing in the Peter B. Lewis Center for the Arts. Of teaching creative writing, Eugenides remarked in his Paris Review interview, "I tell my students that when you write, you should pretend you’re writing the best letter you ever wrote to the smartest friend you have. That way, you’ll never dumb things down. You won’t have to explain things that don’t need explaining. You’ll assume an intimacy and a natural shorthand, which is good because readers are smart and don’t wish to be condescended to. I think about the reader. I care about the reader. Not “audience.” Not “readership.” Just the reader."