Jeffrey Eugenides

It is the early 1980s, the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends...

This collection presents characters in the midst of personal and national crises. We meet a failed poet who, envious of other people's wealth during the real-estate bubble, becomes an embezzler; a clavichordist whose dreams of art collapse under the obligations of marriage and fatherhood; a sexually confused college freshman whose encounter with a stranger on a train leads to a revelation about his past and his future; and a high school student whose...

For many years, the great poet Von Humboldt Fleisher and Charlie Citrine, a young man inflamed with a love for literature, were the best of friends. At the time of his death, however, Humboldt is a failure, and Charlie's life has reached a low point: his career is at a standstill, and he's enmeshed in an acrimonious divorce, infatuated with a highly unsuitable young woman, and involved with a neurotic mafioso. And then Humboldt acts from beyond the...

Kassie, a smart, fun-loving single woman, despite her neurotic best friend Wally's objections, decides it's time to have a baby-- even if it means doing it herself-- with a little help from a charming sperm donor. But, unbeknownst to her, Kassie's plans go awry because of a last-minute switch that isn't discovered until seven years later-- when Wally gets acquainted with Kassie's cute-- though slightly neurotic-- son.

In the mid-1970's, in a sleepy Michigan community, live the Lisbon sisters, five teenagers whose beauty has bewitched a group of neighborhood boys.