Middlesex. Jeffrey Eugenides

       Copyright

      This electronic edition published by

      Fourth Estate 2013

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain 2002 by Bloomsbury Publishing plc

      Copyright © 2002 by Jeffrey Eugenides

      The right of Jeffrey Eugenides to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      The author would like to thank the Whiting Younger Writer’s Awards, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Deutscher Akade-mischer Austauschdienst, the American Academy in Berlin, the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, Helen Papanikolas, and Milton Karafilis, for their help and support. In addition, the author would like to cite the following works from which he drew information crucial in the writing of Middlesex: The Smyrna Affair by Marjorie Housepian Dobkin “Wrestling with Death: Greek Immigrant Funeral Customs in Utah” by Helen Z. Papanikolas; An Original Man by Claude Andrew Clegg III; The Black Muslims in America by C. Eric Lincoln; Venuses Penuses: Sexology, Sexosophy, and Exigency Theory by Dr. John Money; Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History, edited by Gilbert Herdt; Hermaphrodites and the Medical Invention of Sex by Alice Domurat Dreger; “Androgens and the Evolution of Male Gender Identity Among Male Pseudo-hermaphrodites with 5-alpha-reductase Deficiency” by Julianne Imperato-McGinley, M.D., Ralph E. Peterson, M.D., Teofilo Gautier, M.D., and Erasmo Sturla, M.D.; and Hermaphrodites with Attitude, the newspaper published by the Intersex Society of North America.

       www.jeffreyeugenides.com

      Ebook Edition © ISBN: 9780007528653

      Version: 2018-09-26

       Praise for Middlesex

      ‘The year’s most sumptuously enjoyable book … Eugenides gives Callie a graceful fluency of style, enriched with witty phrasing and sensuous detail, that is worthy of John Updike’

      Sunday Times Books of the Year

      ‘Expansive and radiantly generous … a colossal act of curiosity, of imagination and of love’

      New York Times Book Review Books of the Year

      ‘Middlesex is a great Greek-American hermaphrodite epic that we didn’t realise we needed until we read it’

      Jay Mclnerney’s Book of the Year, Observer

      ‘Poised and challenging … compounding stories of immigration and personal reinvention, Eugenides fits the theme of hermaphroditism into the shape of the epic American novel, sprawling through three generations and across a century’

       The Times

      ‘The best American novel since Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections. exuberant, ambitious, deeply compassionate and wildly funny’

       GQ

      ‘A rich comedy … The narrative tone has possible progenitors in Muriel Spark and John Irving, but bears the individual imprint of Greek America’

       Guardian

      ‘Wide in scope, rich in classical allusion … Eugenides is superb at evoking character, and his eye for period detail is absolutely convincing’

       Independent on Sunday

      ’Middlesex has epic sweep, but the mode is archly comic in a way that points backwards to Philip Roth and Saul Bellow as well as to contemporaries David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen and our own Zadie Smith … What really sets Middlesex apart is its warmth and generosity, its pervading air of historical optimism and inclusive, allusive cleverness … novels as good as this aren’t published very often’

       Time Out

      ‘A vibrant chronicle of three generations of a Greek-American immigrant family living through the twentieth century … wonderful’

       Independent

      ‘The true triumph of this novel lies in Eugenides’s ability to move beyond mere titillation, and into a sort of intensification of universal experience … superbly readable’

       Sunday Telegraph

      ‘A sweeping, funny, and tender story of a girl’s unlikely journey to manhood … Eugenides has emerged as the great American writer that many of us suspected him of being’

       Los Angeles Times Book Review

      ‘A marvellously, quirky and moving entertainment, with the narrative energy of Defoe and the gamesomeness of Sterne … In an age of pinched postmodernism, the expansive premodernism of Jeffrey Eugenides’ new book should be welcomed with great cheers and libations of black wine’

       Literary Review

      ‘Employs all its author’s rich storytelling talents to give us one Greek-American family’s idiosyncratic journey … A deeply affecting portrait of one family’s tumultuous engagement with the American twentieth century’

       New York Times

      ‘Genuinely moving … That Eugenides manages to move us without sinking into sentiment shows how successfully he has avoided the tentacles of irony which grip so many writers of his generation’

       Times Literary Supplement

      ‘A wonderfully rich, ambitious novel’

      Salman Rushdie, New York Magazine

      ‘Hilarious and touching … So wildly imaginative that it borders on the bizarre, and yet so warm-hearted that it’s hard to resist’

       USA Today

      ‘Even as Eugenides gives us a contemporary model for the grand narratives of social realism, he has conscripted scientific arguments into the service of unforgettably beautiful myths and metaphors for human nature’

       Evening Standard

      ‘Wildly inventive … it was worth the wait; this is a truly extraordinary novel based around one brilliantly drawn character’

       Red

      ‘The ideal book for those who enjoy intimate tales on an epic scale. *****’

       Sunday Express

      ‘A grand narrative of the immigrant experience and